A Diary Investigation of Primary and Secondary Teachers' Emotional Labor for Negative Emotions

• In Event: Emotions: A Consequential Reality to the Work of Teachers and Professors

Abstract

Theoretical Perspectives: Teaching is an emotional task. The expression of teacher emotions is often bounded by emotional display rules, such as displaying positive emotions, suppressing negative emotions, and restricting the intensity of their emotions to moderate levels (Taxer & Frenzel, 2015). Teachers often engage in emotional labor to achieve these goals and instruct professionally. A large proportion of previous studies on teachers’ emotional labor did not differentiate the valence of underlying emotions (e.g., positive vs. negative emotions; see Wang et al., 2019 and Yin et al., 2019 for reviews). However, the few studies that have investigated teachers’ emotional labor separately for positive and negative emotions have indeed found differences in teachers’ classroom experiences and well-being outcomes. Moreover, although teachers’ emotional labor has received substantial research, its dynamic nature has been largely unexplored. In fact, teachers are not always in a constant state of intense emotional labor; instead, they adjust their emotional expressions according to given situations (e.g., student disruption) to achieve instructional goals.

Objectives: In the current study, we focus on the relatively under-studied field of teachers’ emotional labor for negative emotions. After controlling for the baseline levels of teachers’ emotional exhaustion, we employed an intensive longitudinal design to capture the daily dynamics of teachers’ perceived student disengagement and emotional labor, as well as their summative associations with teachers’ emotional exhaustion.

Method: Data were collected from 587 Canadian teachers and included 4,084 diary survey responses. We examined teachers’ daily perceived student disengagement and daily emotional labor over two consecutive weeks (ten teaching days). Teachers’ emotional exhaustion was examined twice as a trait variable, at the beginning and the end of the semester, with diary surveys administered between these periods (Tables 1 and 2).

Results: The results from multilevel structural equation modeling revealed that, at the within-person level, teachers, on a given day, with disengaged students tended to genuinely express and fake negative emotions. At the between-person level, teachers who perceived greater student disengagement tended to genuinely express their negative emotions rather than fake or hide them. Moreover, hiding negative emotions led to higher emotional exhaustion in teachers, and such results held even after controlling for the baseline level of emotional exhaustion (Figure 1).

Scholarly Significance: In summary, the present research demonstrates that teaching entails tasks that surpass basic caring acts in which teachers are expected to display only positive emotions and suppress negative ones. Teaching takes place in an achievement setting involving substantial responsibility and a complex set of emotional display rules. More specifically, teachers not only express their positive emotions or hide their negative emotions but also instrumentally express negative emotions or even fake more negative emotions when the situation permits. Although previous researchers have extensively claimed that negative emotions are maladaptive for teacher well-being and burnout, the current study compares three emotional labor strategies with which teachers may manage their negative emotions and concludes that the habitual hiding of negative emotions corresponds with poor emotional exhaustion. Genuine expression and faking of negative emotions may be otherwise strategically applied and regulated.

Authors

• Hui Wang, The Education University of Hong Kong
  Presenting Author

• Irena Buric, University of Zadar
  Non-Presenting Author