Poster #107 - Teachers’ Emotional Support Intersects with Emotional Exhaustion in Contributing to Preschoolers’ Emotion Regulation

• In Event: Poster Session 13

Abstract

The importance of young children’s emotion regulation skills has long been recognized (e.g., Grazziano et al., 2007; Raver et al., 2007), yet few studies have examined how early childhood classrooms can support the development of children’s emotion regulation. This is particularly important as children are attending and spending more time in preschool programs than has historically been the case (McFarland et al., 2019; National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], 2021), which led to a recent expansion of Eisenberg’s seminal model of emotion socialization from the family to the classroom context (Valiente et al., 2020). Valiente and colleagues (2020) posit that the social-emotional functioning of socialization agents (e.g., teachers’ emotional exhaustion) and the overall classroom context (e.g., observed emotional support) contribute to children’s emotion-related outcomes in unique and interactive ways. Prior work has shown the unique contributions of emotional exhaustion (Buettner et al., 2016) and emotional support (Bailey et al., 2016) to children’s emotion-related outcomes, yet no studies have examined their interactive contribution. Addressing this gap, we investigate how teacher-reported emotional exhaustion and observed emotional support intersect in contributing to teacher-reported gains in preschoolers’ emotion regulation from fall to spring.
Participants included 767 preschool children (49% female; M = 4.39 years old, SD = .08) and their 108 teachers (98% female; M = 43.25 years old, SD = 11.23). Seventy-five percent of children’s families were considered to have low incomes (income-to-needs ratio M = 1.45, SD = 1.06), and their racial/ethnic composition was: 50% Black, 22% White, 13% Latino, and 15% Other race/ethnicity. Teachers had 15 years of teaching experience (M = 15.14, SD = 8.61), 50% had a master’s degree, and their racial/ethnic composition was: 65% White, 30% Black, 3% Latino, and 2% Multiracial. Children were in a mix of federal/Head Start (n = 10), state (n = 84), and privately funded, nonprofit (n = 12) classrooms. Teachers reported on their emotional exhaustion during fall using the Maslach Burnout Inventory-Educator Survey (MBI-ES; Maslach et al., 1996). Trained observers rated the classroom emotional support using the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS; Pianta et al., 2008) in fall, winter, and spring; time points were averaged to create a more reliable estimate of emotional support across the year. Teachers rated children’s emotion regulation in fall and spring using the Emotion Regulation Checklist (ERC; Shields & Cicchetti, 1997).
Two-level multilevel models were conducted in which teachers’ perceptions of individual children’s emotion regulation were nested within classrooms, and the interaction between observed emotional support and teacher-reported emotional exhaustion was entered at level two. Controlling for fall emotion regulation and a rich set of covariates, preliminary results indicate that observed emotional support contributes to spring teacher-rated emotion regulation only when teachers report relatively low emotional exhaustion (see Figure 1). Findings help us understand the combined contribution of teachers’ social-emotional functioning and the classroom climate to young children’s emotion-related outcomes. Implications include highlighting the importance of taking care of teachers’ psychological wellbeing, along with underscoring the role of the preschool classroom as an emotion socialization context.

Authors

• Pilar Alamos, University of Virginia - Charlottesville
  Presenting Author

• Kelsey Ann Clayback, University of Virginia - Charlottesville

• Amanda P Williford, University of Virginia - Charlottesville

• Jason Downer, University of Virginia - Charlottesville

• Khara Lynn Pence Turnbull, University of Virginia - Charlottesville