Intensity of the experience of emotions and their regulation in primary school teachers

In our master’s thesis we discuss the intensity of emotion experience and emotion regulation of primary teachers who deal with children from the first two three-year cycles. Our main goal was to examine how intense these teachers experience individual emotions (happiness, love, pride, anger, exhaustion and hopelessness), the frequency of using emotion regulation strategies in everyday situations and whether there are any connections between the frequency of using individual emotion regulation strategies and different levels of intensity of unpleasant emotions experience (anger, exhaustion and hopelessness) for the above-mentioned primary school teachers. The theoretical part first summarizes definition, terminology, classification, functions and characteristics of individual emotions we discuss in our thesis. Secondly, it defines emotion regulation strategies as they were described by Gross and Thompson (2007), the efficiency of emotion regulation and emotional maturity. In the following chapter we outline the characteristics of teaching as a profession. The theoretical part concludes with the description of teachers’ emotions and their regulation of unpleasant emotions. The empirical part describes our study which included 114 elementary teachers from different Slovenian primary schools. Teachers completed an online questionnaire about their emotion experience and emotion regulation. Results show that teachers experience very intense happiness, intense pride and love, exhaustion of moderate intensity and less intensive hopelessness and anger during work. All in all, teachers experience pleasant emotion of higher intensity than unpleasant emotions. They often regulate their emotions with attention deployment, cognitive change of meaning and physiological response modulation. Occasionally, they regulate emotions with physical activation, social support seeking, situation modification, situation selection, suppression and cognitive change of importance. They rarely regulate emotions with comfort eating and hardly ever use substances to regulate emotions (e.g., pills). There is a significant positive correlation between the intensity of teachers’ anger experience and the frequency of using the following emotion regulation strategies: comfort eating, social support seeking, cognitive change of importance, suppression, substance use and experiential change and significant negative connection between the intensity of anger experience and attention deployment strategy. The intensity of teachers’ hopelessness experience is significantly positively correlated with the frequency of following emotion regulation strategies: comfort eating, social support seeking, cognitive change of importance, suppression and experiential change. It is also significantly negatively correlated to the frequency of strategies attention deployment and cognitive change of meaning. Teachers’ exhaustion experience intensity is significantly positively correlated with following strategies: comfort eating, substance use and experiential change. Our findings provide improved understanding of teachers’ emotions and emotion regulation. They can assist teachers and other staff to regulate their emotions more efficiently, which may improve their work quality with pupils