Students’ use of learning strategies and self-regulated learning can be viewed as a form of resource management. By self-regulating, learners work towards realistic assessments of the endogenous and exogenous resources available to them for their learning activities. They set learning goals in line with the quality and quantity of these resources to the end of achieving these goals through intensive learning processes characterized by constant monitoring and adaptation. Thus essential prerequisites for the optimal use of self-regulatory processes include valuing learning, dealing constructively with setbacks, persistence in the pursuance of goals, and volitional control. Emotions play an important role in all of these aspects. Viewing emotion as an endogenous resource, we examine the contribution it makes to students’ use of learning strategies and self-regulated learning in a group of 117 high-achieving primary school students. In a first step, students were clustered according to their emotional resources. This resulted in two different clusters, one emotionally favorable cluster (n = 82), with students who reported experiencing a lot of joy and little boredom, anger or fear when working with texts; the other cluster was named emotionally unfavorable (n = 35), as students reported low levels of joy and high levels of boredom and anger when working with texts. Students in both clusters indicated experiencing only little anxiety, a fact that can be traced back to all of them being high-achieving students. The clusters were then compared according to students’ learning preferences. Our results suggest that students who dispose of good emotional resources, e.g. who belonged to the emotionally favorable cluster, marginally prefer self-regulated learning and externally regulated learning behavior (e.g., parentally regulated or teacher-guided learning processes). Students who were assigned to the emotionally unfavorable cluster significantly preferred an impulsive style of learning. In a second step, we examine whether students’ emotional resources influence their use of and success in a seven-week training program for self-regulated learning.