Educational self-efficacy and its relationship with learners' different psychological traits can have a tremendous effect on the success or failure of the students. Thus, the present research sought to investigate whether academic self-efficacy has an effect on the students' stress derived from the education expectations based on such mediating factor as the difficulty of emotion regulation. The research method was descriptive-correlational based on structural equations. The statistical population consisted of all 800 junior female high-school students, 9th grade, from 16 State schools in the third district of Tehran. To decide on the sample size according to the number of observed variables, assigning a coefficient of 25 for each (7 variables in the model), and taking the possibility of incomplete questionnaires into account, 200 people were chosen by cluster sampling method. The data were gathered using three questionnaires: self-efficacy (Jinks & Morgan, 1999), difficulty in emotion regulation (Gross & John, 2003), and educational expectation (Ang & Huan, 2006). Using the structural equation modelling, the data analysis revealed that educational self-efficacy and difficulty in emotion regulation had a direct and significant effect on the stress caused by educational expectations. Also, an indirect effect of educational self-efficacy with the mediation of difficulty in emotion regulation was captured and the research model was revealed to predict 63% of the stress variable due to educational expectations. The study revealed the importance of cognitive factors in explaining the stress caused by academic expectations.
