Teachers’ emotions and emotion regulation strategies: personal and contextual antecedents and effects on motivation, well-being and relationships with students
 

Although cognition, motivation and emotion are recognized by psychologists as the three fundamental classes of mental operations (Mayer, Salovey and Caruso, 2000), most research in educational psychology has primarily focused on the first two classes. This is especially true regarding teachers’ emotional lives. The existing knowledge on teachers’ emotions indicates their influential potential on instructional practices, professional and personality development and well-being. By implication, emotions experienced by teachers in classroom settings and in relation to their other professional activities, arise as a very important topic of research. Thus, the main goal of this research proposal is to investigate the phenomena of teachers’ emotions and emotion regulation strategies as well as their personal and contextual antecedents and effects on various aspects of personal and professional functioning. In order to achieve this goal, the multimethod approaches will be implemented.  More precisely, through the combination of qualitative and quantitative  methods, cross-sectional and longitudinal research designs, and individual and nomothetic approach, relations between teachers’ emotions and emotion regulation strategies, their personal (e.g. temperament, personality, beliefs, goals, cognitive appraisals) and contextual antecedents (factors from teachers’ school environment), as well as their effects on motivation (e.g. intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation, goal orientations, self-efficacy), well-being (e.g. emotional labour, emotional exhaustion, burnout, mental health and intention to leave the profession) and relationships with students (e.g. different aspects of student-teacher interaction) will be explored on the samples of elementary-school teachers.

Project funded by Croatian Science Foundation