An Exploration of Emotional Labor in Teachers: A Discrete Emotion Perspective

• In Event: Sheraton Roundtable Session 39
  In Roundtable Session: Teacher Stress and Emotions: Lifting Burdens and Promoting Job Satisfaction

Abstract

The emotions that teachers experience and those they choose to express represent two distinct constructs, with teachers regularly deciding to genuinely express their emotions or to hide or fake their emotional experiences for the sake of their students (i.e., emotional labor). The current exploratory study employed multitrait-multimethod (MTMM) analytical technique and multilevel modeling to explore Canadian practicing teachers’ (N = 1086) emotional labor concerning 12 specific discrete emotions with respect to genuine emotion expression as compared to faking or hiding these emotional experiences. Moreover, this study also examined whether teachers’ emotional expressions were organized in an emotion-specific or strategy-specific manner, and further, explored the extent to which individual differences and within-teacher variability accounted for emotional labor in teachers.

Authors

• Hui Wang, McGill University

• Nathan C. Hall, McGill University

• Sonia Rahimi, McGill University