Emotionality and critical citizenship: Evidence from engineering students

Abstract

This research explores the relationship between emotion and critical thinking in 144 first-year students at a technological institute in Yucatán, Mexico. Through a validated questionnaire featuring four digital dilemmas, 576 brief narratives were collected. Mixed analysis (descriptive counting and open-axial-selective qualitative coding) revealed that 75% of initial reactions were affective. Three narrative cores dominated: moral outrage (36.1%), critical curiosity (43.1%), and reflective empathy (20.8%). Upon introducing dissonant sources, nearly half of the responses shifted from an Uncritical-Uncritical pattern to an Uncritical-Critical one, suggesting that outrage can serve as a cognitive lever if the classroom provides contrasting inputs. The findings support the relevance of incorporating metacognitive pauses as a pedagogical practice that slows down the attention economy and fosters reflective digital citizenship. Socio-critical and humanistic implications for curricula are discussed, as well as inherent limitations related to convenience sampling and the need to extend longitudinal follow-up (T₁–T₄) to contexts with precarious connectivity. Finally, it is proposed that literacy is not only about teaching how to “navigate” the web but how to breathe within it: managing the emotional spark so that the fire of judgment illuminates without consuming.