Investigating the relationship between pre-service early childhood teachers emotional awareness levels and their emotion regulation strategies

Abstract

This study was designed to document pre-service early childhood teachers’ emotion regulation strategies and to investigate whether these strategies are explained by their emotional awareness levels and demographic variables such as gender, GPA, type of high school, educational and employment status of parents, and accommodation status of pre-service teachers. The data was collected via “Individual Data Form”, “Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20)”, “The Emotion Regulation Questionnaire” and “Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (CERQ)”. The study group consisted of 393 (339 female and 53 male) pre-service early childhood teachers attending six universities. We found the group’s emotional awareness levels correlated with their use of catastrophizing, self-blame, rumination, positive reappraisal, planning, and suppression strategies. On the other hand, their use of strategies for reappraisal, acceptance, positive refocusing, and putting into perspective is closely related to demographic variables to do with parents’ education levels, the type of high school they graduated from, and/or their currently attending university. © 2014 European Journal of Research on Education by IASSR.