Understanding and regulation of emotions in primary school teachers regarding their work experience

The diploma thesis deals with emotions and involves a detailed study of the understanding, awareness and regulation of emotions in classroom teachers. The theoretical part explains that emotions are complex and compound processes that include various cognitive, physiological, expressive and behaviour-related reactions (Smrtnik Vitulić, 2007). The thesis highlights the important role of emotions in teachers who in their work are in contact with a variety of people every day and are expected to understand their emotions and how to regulate them. A detailed presentation of emotion regulation strategies classified into four large groups is given, namely cognitive or thinking-related, physical-physiological, expression-behaviour-related and social strategies. The empirical part presents the results of a study in which 108 classroom teachers from thirteen Slovene primary schools and their five subsidiaries participated. Thirteen teachers were novices with a teaching experience ranging from one to three years and the remaining 95 experienced teachers who have been teaching for more than three years. A questionnaire prepared by S. Prosen and H. Smrtnik Vitulić (2011) was used in the study. The study addressed three research topics, namely the types of emotions classroom teachers most often thought about, how they comprehended their emotions and to what extent they were aware of them, and which groups of emotion regulation strategies they used when working with pupils. The author was also interested in establishing whether any statistically significant differences between novice and experienced teachers existed with regard to comprehension and awareness of emotions and the use of groups of emotion regulation strategies when working with pupils. The results showed that their emotions predominantly comprised joy, followed by anger, love, sadness and fear. The majority of the teachers were aware of their emotions, paid attention to them, knew how to describe them and often attributed the reasons for experiencing unpleasant emotions to themselves rather than to other people or factors from the environment. The teachers also utilised all four of the groups of emotion regulation strategies quite often, that is cognitive, physical-physiological, expression-behaviour-related and social strategies. No statistically significant differences were found between novice and experienced teachers regarding the understanding and awareness of their emotions or the use of any of the four groups of emotion regulation strategies. Emotions are extremely important in the teaching profession since only those teachers who can express and regulate positive as well as negative emotions in their work in an appropriate manner will be able to encourage a variegated expression of emotions in their pupils and provide them with an opportunity to obtain social and emotional knowledge and skills