Teachers' emotion regulation

Abstract

While emotion regulation is an area of spirited research in social psychology, the investigation of teachers' emotion regulation is a new area of inquiry and in this chapter we summarize recent theoretical and empirical research on emotion regulation, present new data on the relationship between teachers' emotion regulation and efficacy, and suggest new research directions. The discussion of recent research includes a summary of three prominent models of emotion regulation (hot/cool, resource, and process), applications of these models to the work of teachers, consideration of the advantages and disadvantages of emotion regulation, and proposed relationships between the processes used in emotion regulation and teacher efficacy. The new empirical data comes from over 400 teachers in the USA who completed questionnaires focusing on their beliefs concerning their effectiveness of their own emotion regulation, their use of two emotion regulation strategies (reappraisal and suppression), and three types of teacher efficacy (instructional strategies, classroom management, student engagement). Over 95% of teachers believed that expressing positive emotions makes them more effective, compared to only 35% who believe the expression of negative emotions makes them more effective. Levels of beliefs about the effectiveness of showing positive (but not negative) emotions were significantly related to efficacy in student engagement and classroom management. For K-8 teachers, beliefs of efficacy in engagement and management were significantly related to the use of appraisal (but not suppression) as an emotion regulation strategy. Teachers who reported high levels of emotion intensity seemed likely to show their emotions more often in the classroom than those teachers reporting lower levels of emotion intensity, but reported lower levels of efficacy for classroom strategies and management. Future research should include more developed instruments, explore the role of teachers' emotion regulation in self determination and goal theories of motivation, and continue to test applications of the major models of emotion regulation to the lives of teachers. © 2006 Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.