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Teachers’ emotions and emotion management: integrating emotion regulation theory with emotional labor research

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Abstract

While the similarities between emotion regulation (Gross in J Personal Soc Psychol 74:224–237, 1998a) and emotional labor (Hochschild in The managed heart: commercialization of human feeling. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1983) have been theoretically discussed, empirical research on their relation is lacking. We examined the relations between the two constructs as well as their relations with teachers’ discrete emotions in a sample of 189 secondary school teachers. The results showed that reappraisal correlated positively with deep acting, whereas suppression correlated positively with surface acting. The findings further suggest that reappraisal and deep acting are linked to experiencing positive emotions, whereas suppression and surface acting are linked to experiencing negative emotions. However, there also were some differences in how emotion regulation and emotional labor were related to teachers’ discrete emotional experiences. Specifically, reappraisal and deep acting strategies were positively related to enjoyment; in addition, deep acting was negatively related to negative emotions such as anxiety, anger, and frustration. By contrast, suppression and surface acting strategies were positively associated with negative emotions (i.e., suppression with anxiety; surface acting with anxiety, anger, and frustration), and surface acting was negatively associated with the positive emotion enjoyment. Implications for integrating research on teachers’ emotion regulation and emotional labor are discussed.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Anne C. Frenzel for her valuable comments on an earlier version of this manuscript, and Wolfgang Sack, Teresa Schirmbeck, Stefan Hauser, and Cornelia Meyer for their assistance in the data collection.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Munich, Leopoldstrasse 13, 80802, Munich, Germany

    Mikyoung Lee, Reinhard Pekrun, Elisabeth Vogl & Xiyao Xie

  2. Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Jamie L. Taxer

  3. Department of Educational Psychology, University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, USA

    Paul A. Schutz

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  1. Mikyoung Lee
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  2. Reinhard Pekrun
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  3. Jamie L. Taxer
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Correspondence to Mikyoung Lee.

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Lee, M., Pekrun, R., Taxer, J.L. et al. Teachers’ emotions and emotion management: integrating emotion regulation theory with emotional labor research. Soc Psychol Educ 19, 843–863 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11218-016-9359-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11218-016-9359-5

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