Primary school teacher's emotion regulation: Impact on occupational well‐being, job burnout, and resilience

Abstract

AbstractEmpirical studies have demonstrated the importance of emotion regulation for teachers' professional development. We adopted a person‐centered approach to explore primary school teachers' emotion regulation and its impact on occupational well‐being, job burnout, and resilience. To understand the potential types of emotion regulation, we conducted a survey in different primary schools. Both antecedent‐ and response‐focused emotion regulation are important strategies; previous studies revealed that the former is superior to the latter. However, there is a lack of person‐centered research on the pros and cons of such emotion regulation. 366 primary school teachers (333 female teachers; Mage = 37.30, SDage = 9.46) participated in this survey. The emotion regulation patterns were clarified based on latent profile analysis (LPA). The results revealed associations among these patterns and job burnout, occupational well‐being and resilience. LPA revealed the following: (1) three typical emotion regulation types: the low antecedent‐ and low response‐focused emotion regulation group (12%), the high antecedent‐ and low response‐focused emotion regulation group (63%), and the low antecedent‐ and high response‐focused emotion regulation group (25%). (2) The teachers in the high antecedent‐ and low response‐focused emotion regulation group had the lowest level of job burnout and the highest level of occupational well‐being. Those in the low antecedent‐ and low response‐focused emotion regulation group had the strongest psychological resilience.