Investigating the Role of Early Childhood Teachers’ Emotion Regulation, Stress and Depression in Emotion-Focused Teaching Practices and Classroom Quality

Vera Hawa

Advisor: Timothy W Curby, PhD, Department of Psychology

Committee Members: Thalia Goldstein, Pamela Garner

Online Location, Online
April 14, 2025, 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM

Abstract:

Early childhood teachers play a pivotal role in fostering children's emotional competence through specific emotion-focused teaching practices and global interactions with children. This study explores teachers self-reported general emotion regulation and the accuracy of their judgments of the effectiveness of emotion regulation strategies in the classroom in relation to their emotion-focused teaching practices and global interactions. Additionally, the study explores whether teachers' stress and depressive symptoms predict both emotion-focused teaching and classroom quality. Analyses indicated that early childhood teachers who have more accurate judgments of effective emotion regulation strategies in the classroom tended to be observed with higher levels of emotion-focused teaching practices. Teachers with more accurate judgments of effective emotion regulation strategies reported fewer depressive symptoms and were less likely to rely on emotion suppression as a regulation strategy. Furthermore, teachers with higher depressive symptoms were observed to provide less emotional support in the classroom, while stressed teachers have difficulties with classroom organization and management. Multiple regression analyses confirmed that context-specific emotion regulation uniquely predicts emotion-focused teaching, even after controlling for trait-like emotion regulation. These findings highlight the value of emotion regulation measures that are context specific and point to the need to better understand emotion regulation in teaching.