Poster #217 - Teachers’ Beliefs about Anger Impact Their Recognition of Children’s Emotions

• In Event: 2-110 - Poster Session 07
  In Poster Session: PS 07 Section - Social, Emotional, Personality

Integrative Statement

Teachers who understand and can effectively manage their students’ emotions enjoy strong positive relationships with their students and vice versa (Demetriou et al., 2009; Hargreaves, 2000). Moreover, teachers who lack emotion understanding are more likely to have students with more disruptive behaviors and lower levels of performance (Jennings & Greenberg, 2009). Therefore, understanding more about what aids teachers’ recognition of emotion in children can be important in improving teachers’ support of children’s social and emotional competencies in the classroom. Teachers are important socializers of elementary school children, and sometimes spend as much or more time with children on school days than parents.
In other socialization domains, beliefs about emotions play an integral role in the skill of recognizing emotions (Castro et al., 2015; Dunsmore et al., 2009). Therefore, teachers’ beliefs about children’s emotions may also play a role in motivating their ability to recognize children’s emotions, and specificity in beliefs may relate directly to skill for specific emotions. A key question may be how teachers think about student anger, as student anger can be perceived as a challenge to some teachers but an opportunity to others. Thus, variability in beliefs about anger may guide teachers in how they notice and recognize versus ignore or avoid recognizing anger.
To study whether teacher beliefs predict teacher accuracy for different emotions conveyed by children, we created a scale assessing beliefs about children’s anger in school. Items are based on the meta-emotion and parental belief literatures (Halberstadt et al., 2013; Hooven, Gottman, & Katz, 1995). An exploratory factor analysis revealed two subscales of particular interest: Anger provides Insight, α = .67, Anger is Problematic, α =.73. We measured teachers’ skill in recognizing emotions in dynamic facial expressions of 72 children (½ Black; ½ Female; Halberstadt et al., 2016). Elementary-school teachers (N =43) completed tasks one month apart. We predicted that teachers who believe that anger in school provides insight would be more accurate at recognizing anger, whereas teachers who believed that anger is problematic might demonstrate more vigilance and thus have errors for emotions similar to anger (e.g., they might assume anger for similar emotions).
The two teacher beliefs were included in four linear regression models for accuracy: anger, disgust (because similar to anger), sadness, and fear (the latter two because they are negative, but not like anger). As predicted, the belief that student anger is insightful uniquely predicted teachers’ accuracy for children’s anger. The belief that anger is problematic showed no effect for anger accuracy, but uniquely and negatively predicted disgust. These results suggest that teachers’ beliefs may be emotion specific. That is, teachers who value anger will more accurately identify it, and those who don’t value anger or see it as problematic will be less accurate for anger or related emotions. These results suggest that beliefs guide teachers’ skills with students, with implications for socialization of emotional development in the school context.

Authors

• Courtney Alexandra Hagan, North Carolina State University
  Presenting Author

• Xi Liu, North Carolina State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Alison N Cooke, North Carolina State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Amy Halberstadt, North Carolina State University
  Non-Presenting Author