On Teachers’ Emotional Forecasting Accuracy And Influencing Factors

The emotional forecasting is an important component of emotional intelligence,which is a research focus of social psychology, emotional psychology, consumerpsychology, management psychology, health psychology and sports psychology inrecent2decades. Forecasting students emotions is a common occupational behaviorfor teachers. Accurately forecasting students emotions can optimize teachers’educational decision-making, implement effective education, reduce empathic gapsbetween teachers and students and promote harmonious relationship betweenteachers and students. This is not only fully demonstrated the characteristics ofteachers professional prospective, but an important manifestation of teachersprofessional competence of emotional intelligence. However, what kind of featureswhen refers to the accuracy of teachers’ forecasting? What kind of factors mayinfluence the forecasting accuracy? How can we enhance the accuracy of teachersforecasting students emotions? We still know nothing about the above problems.Therefore, based on past research of emotional forecasting, the study combines thepractice of educational activities, selects typical education activities scenarios andfocus on accuracy of forecasting emotions. A variety of methods such asdocumentary research, interviews, surveys, questionnaires, field experiments andlaboratory experiments were integrated to use. Especially from two theoretical andempirical aspects, we conduct the study on accuracy of teachers forecasting studentsemotions and related impacting factors comprehensively and systematically. Thestudy not only can extend new areas of the emotional forecasting, expand teachersemotional intelligence research, enrich emotional education psychological theory,but can provide an effective strategy for the promotion blend of teachers andstudents emotions and provide useful insights to promote the teachers’ professionaldevelopment.The research mainly was carried out from the following three aspects:Firstly, we conduct research according to characteristics of teachers emotionalforecasting accuracy including two types of situations investigation. On the basis ofthe open-ended questionnaires, interviews with teachers, and teachers seminars, the questionnaire on teachers emotional forecasting scenarios were worked out and thesurvey was implemented to examine the accuracy of teachers’ forecasting groupstudents emotions. We selected the typical educational context and in turnsimplement three scenarios of the small sample survey to examine the accuracy ofteachers’ forecasting individual students emotions.Secondly, we carried out experimental research according to influencing factorsof forecasting accuracy including eight specific experiments from the three sets ofexperiments.We sequentially examined attention focusing; example anchoring andempathic anchoring influences on teachers’ emotional forecasting accuracy. Thethree sets of experiments not only reveal the influencing factors, but explain why theforecasting bias generated and how to improve forecasting accuracy from bothpositive and negative aspects.Thirdly, we carried out the research according to teachers emotional forecastingcognitive strategies.According to the results of the second part of the experiments,we conducted teachers emotional forecasting cognitive strategies questionnaire andimplemented the survey to reveal the cognitive strategies characteristics of teachersemotional forecasting level and the type of strategies to provides empirical evidencesfor carrying out intervention of enhancing teachers emotional forecasting accuracy.Through above studies, we obtained the following conclusions:1.From different situations, different samples, and different emotionalmeasurement methods we obtained consistent results: No matter forecasting groupstudents or individual student, the results show that teachers emotional forecastingaccuracy overall is poor and there is a clear forecasting bias. From the forecastingestimating, teachers show consistent significantly overestimated when forecastinggroup students emotions. While forecasting individual student emotions, teachers donot show a significant trend of high estimate or underestimate.2. Teachers’ emotional forecasting accuracy is not affected by gender, disciplineand teaching experience. Differences exist when teachers forecast students’ differentemotions. We find teachers can be able to forecast students negative emotions andseem weak in forecasting students future positive emotions. 3. We discover attention focusing effect in teachers emotional forecasting,which means that teachers pay more attention to the character, extent of the eventsand they can make relatively more accurate forecasts. But whether the information isfull can not influence the accuracy of teachers emotional forecasting. Teachers canmake forecasting when they perceive to the critical information of typical situations.4. We find example anchoring effect in teachers emotional forecasting and theresults show that teachers will refer to students’ emotional sample of memory whenthey forecast student emotions. But the example anchoring does not necessarilypromote forecasting accuracy. Only typical samples are effective anchors.5. We also find empathic anchoring effect in teachers emotional forecastingwhich means that teachers are influenced by self-forecasting when they are in theprocess of forecasting students emotions. But empathic anchor does not necessarilypromote teachers emotional forecasting accuracy. Only when teachers putthemselves in the perspective of students, they may actively take advantage ofempathy anchors.6. Teachers emotional forecasting cognitive strategies questionnaire which isconducted on the basis of the experimental results has good reliability and validity.According to the investigation result from questionnaire, we find teachers overalllevel of emotional forecasting cognitive strategies show a positive trend, but there isstill a large development space. The results from Latent Profile Analysis（LPA）showwhen it refer to emotional forecasting cognitive strategies, teachers can be dividedinto three types including " strategy lag","good strategy" and "strategy optimized".