Extrinsic Emotion Regulation in the Classroom: Teachers' Attempts to Regulate Students' Emotions

• In Event: Turning That Frown Upside Down: Emotion Regulation in Achievement Settings

Abstract

Teachers are often faced with the responsibility of establishing and maintaining the emotional climate of the classroom. To establish an optimal emotional climate, teachers may wish to regulate their own emotions (i.e., intrinsic regulation) or the emotions of their students (i.e., extrinsic regulation). It could very well be that one emotion regulation action serves both intrinsic and extrinsic regulation functions. So far research on emotion regulation has predominately focused on intrinsic rather than extrinsic emotion regulation (see Zaki & Williams, 2013). Within research on emotion regulation and teachers research has exclusively focused on the intrinsic aspect of emotion regulation (cf. Chang, 2009; Sutton, 2004; Taxer & Frenzel, 2015); however, to meet their classroom goals, teachers may need to try to regulate their students’ emotions as well as their own. Using the extended process model of emotion regulation (Gross, 2015) as a framework, we examined how often teachers attempt to regulate their students’ emotions and which emotion regulation strategies they use to do so (situation selection, situation modification, attentional deployment, cognitive change, response modulation).
Fifty-six American teachers completed a survey on their emotion regulation goals and strategy usage in the classroom. The survey included open-ended questions that were developed based on the process model of emotion regulation (Gross, 2015). Responses were coded for their regulatory focus (extrinsic, intrinsic, or both) and for which strategies were used (situation selection, situation modification, attentional deployment, cognitive change, or response modulation).
All responses were analyzed at the response level rather than the teacher level. Teachers provided a total of 230 responses. Out of these responses 5 were coded as extrinsic and 140 were coded as both intrinsic and extrinsic. This means that in most scenarios (58.6%), teachers were trying to regulate both their own and their students’ emotions. These were either attempts of co-regulation or conscious attempts of regulating their own emotions as a means of regulating their students’ emotions. Teachers described scenarios in which they used situation selection (n=16), situation modification (n=27), attentional deployment (n=25), cognitive change (n=22), and response modulation (n=79) strategies to regulate their students’ emotions. An example of the most commonly used strategy, response modulation was “Sometimes I might feign enthusiasm for an important but sometimes boring (economics) subject because I know the students don't have an interest in the subject.”
These findings underscore the complexity of emotion regulation in the classroom, and suggest multiple directions for future research. Our results clearly show that teachers attempt to regulate their students’ emotions and that extrinsic emotion regulation in the classroom deserves more research attention. Furthermore, teachers use a variety of strategies to influence their students’ emotions; however, our results highlight that teachers frequently report using a strategy, response modulation, that has been found to be negatively related to their well-being when used for intrinsic emotion regulation (Taxer & Frenzel, 2015). Thus, future research could examine if these negative effects are also present when the goal is to regulate students’ emotions and the regulation attempt was successful.

Authors

• Jamie Taxer, Stanford University

• James J Gross, Stanford University