| Children's ability to understand, express, and regulate emotion is related to increased academic, behavioral and social-emotional competence. Given that teachers provide a strong relational context for child development and that school-based experiences can impact emotional development, it is likely that teachers are influential in children's emotion socialization, and yet little is known about how teachers think about and respond to emotions in their classrooms. In this study, based in functional and Self-determination theories, we aimed to: (1) describe children's emotion and teachers' responses to children's emotion in kindergarten and first grade classrooms, (2) assess teachers' beliefs about emotion socialization, (3) understand relations between teachers' emotion socialization beliefs and their responses to emotion in the classroom, as well as how these beliefs and behaviors relate to classroom emotional and motivational environment. We created the Classroom Emotion Interaction Record (CEIR) to code children's emotion and teachers' responses to emotion in classroom observations and the Teacher Emotion Socialization Interview (TESI) to assess teachers' emotion socialization beliefs. We found that there was wide variation in how frequently children expressed emotions, and that mostly low intensity anger was expressed. For the vast majority of recorded emotion expressions, teachers managed the behavior that co-occurred with the expression of emotion with many fewer instances of teachers responding to emotions by inquiring about, labeling, or accepting emotion or acknowledging the psychological need underlying the emotion. In addition, we found that teacher beliefs predicted teacher emotion socialization behaviors even after the effects of emotion type, frequency, and intensity were controlled. Finally, teachers who demonstrated greater motivation-orientation in their beliefs, engaged children in regards to their behavior, or used emotion- or motivation-based responses to emotion had classrooms with more positive affect and child engagement even after the effects of class size and emotion frequency were controlled. Given this initial evidence of the importance of classroom emotion socialization, investment in the development of teacher training and classroom support in this area may go far toward the goal of providing children with classroom environments which support the development of crucial emotional competencies that will serve them across contexts as they develop. |
