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Dourish, & Sengers, 2007 [4], for critical reviews).

Concerning the physiological component, and in particular the electrodermal activity, the study of Pecchinnnda and Smith (1996) provides psychological significance of spontaneous skin conductance activity. In that work, participants were given to solve a set of anagrams which difficulty was manipulated by both the objective difficulty (easy, moderately, difficult, extremely difficult)
and the amount of time available to solve the problems
(30 vs. 120 seconds). The authors demonstrate that the skin conductance activity during problem solving is correlated to the appraisals of coping potential: in a difficult problem, appraisals of coping potential based on self-report are especially low and produce selective disengagement of the task, yielding reduced skin conductance activity. The spontaneous electrodermal activity is interpreted as reflecting task engagement (Pecchinnda, 2001 [17]). Moreover, the results of Clément and Duvallet (2007
[6]) support the idea that skin conductance activity is a convergent measure of appraisal-related processes and that facial expressions reflect the appraisals of the events according to their conduciveness for the goal (Kaiser &
Wehrle, 2001 [12]; Scherer, 1999 [21]; Smith, 1991 [25];
Smith & Scott, 1997 [28]).

## The Appraisal-Coping Model

The appraisal-coping model adaptation to the "Cascades" problem (see figure 4) allows us to analyse in a more accurate way the children's cognitive emotional activities. The appraisal step deals with the evaluation and the prediction of the plan selected by the child in order to solve the problem. According to this appraisal step, the child will fill in a hexagon, following his selected plan, or correct a previous result, or if the appraisal step leads to a bad evaluation, he will change his plan (we observe that the exercice instructions are interpreted in many different ways, especially for children with school difficulties).

The coping strategy is the actual decision a child will take with respect to his previous choices. The coping process is usually accompanied by an emotional reaction which depends on the appraisal consequences. For instance, if the child decides to reinforce his strategy, his emotional state will be positive. On the contrary, if he continually changes his plans, the situation will end up with a progressive disengagement for the task.