Teachers’ emotion regulation and related environmental, personal, instructional, and well-being factors: A meta-analysis

Teachers experience and express various emotions of different qualities and intensities. They also adopt emotion regulation strategies to increase teaching effectiveness and maintain professionalism. Previous reviews of teachers’ emotion regulation have focused on their emotional labor (i.e., deep and surface acting)—a subdimension of emotion regulation. The present review aims to incorporate multiple perspectives and conceptualizations, hence affording a more comprehensive understanding of teachers’ emotion regulation by examining antecedent- and response-focused strategies. The present meta-analysis included 87 articles investigating the relationships between teachers’ emotion regulation and seven related environmental, personal, instructional, and well-being factors (i.e., work-role interaction expectations, school context, classroom context, personal characteristics, motivation, teaching effectiveness, and teacher well-being). Antecedent-focused strategies demonstrated more adaptive associations with the related factors than response-focused strategies. More specifically, teachers who receive school support, have engaged and disciplined students, and possess favorable personal characteristics (e.g., conscientiousness) tend to adopt antecedent-focused emotion regulation; these teachers also have greater well-being. In contrast, teachers who work at unsupportive schools or who have relatively unfavorable personal characteristics (e.g., neuroticism) tend to use response-focused strategies; these teachers also have poor teaching effectiveness and well-being. Additional moderating analyses found differences concerning the conceptualizations of emotion regulation and cultural backgrounds.