65

This article focuses on how students in a literary preparatory class in a private school in the west of Paris learn to regulate their emotions. Preparatory class produces strict work environments, creating a specific relationship to time and schoolwork. Often unsettled on finding themselves in this institutional universe, the students learn to cope with a new and implicit dimension by working individually on their emotions and how they perceive them. We show how this work on emotions provides a means of adapting to the institutional constraints by fluctuating between engagement and distancing. This contribution seeks to highlight a particular use of emotion, whose rhythm and methods vary according to social and academic background.