Teachers’ sentiment about physical appearance of school students correlated with student-teacher relationship quality and bullying victimization

Introduction: Students’ characteristics, including both mental and physical characteristics, are important factors for their teachers to form sentiments about them. Compared to mental characteristics, students’ physical appearance characteristics, which may also have an influence on student-teacher relationship quality and school bullying victimization, are less explored. In this study, the relationships among teachers’ sentiment about students’ physical appearance, student-teacher relationship, and school bullying victimization were examined. Method: Participants (1123 students and 72 teachers) were recruited from 13 primary and secondary schools in northern Italy. The final valid participants were 1081 students and 71 teachers. Students reported their involvement in bullying victimization by filling out the Adolescent Peer Relations Instrument. Teachers rated relationship quality with their students by filling out the Student-Teacher Relationship Scale, and reported their sentiments about students’ physical appearance by answering an open-end question (“What physical characteristics of this child are particularly noteworthy, in a positive or negative sense?”, analyzed by using the NRC Emotion Lexicon. Correlation analysis and mediation analysis with a multi-categorical antecedent were conducted in SPSS. Results: Students whose physical appearance were positively described tended to have closer (r = 0.24, p ＜ 0.001) and less conflictual (r = -0.09, p ＜ 0.05) relationships with their teachers, while those negatively described tended to have more conflictual (r = 0.17, p ＜ 0.001) and less closer (r = -0.18, p ＜ 0.001) relationships. Mediation analyses further revealed that student-teacher relationship conflict plays a mediating role in the relationship between receiving negative evaluations on physical appearance and students’ bullying victimization involvement