Thursday, October 29, 2015 at 10:00 a.m.
Neville Scarfe Building, Room 304A
Title: Teachers’ Emotion Regulation as a Protective Factor Against Burnout
Supervisor: Dr. Shelley Hymel
Committee: Dr. Martin Guhn and Dr. Deb Butler
ABSTRACT
Burnout, which involves emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment, is one reason that many educators report leaving the teaching profession. Many of the risk factors associated with burnout have been explored at great length but very little attention has been paid to the protective factors that might mitigate burnout. To this end, this study examined the role emotion regulation, both the general knowledge of emotion regulation skills and the reported use of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression two common emotion regulation strategies, plays in relation to job satisfaction and burnout. Participants were 233 K-12 teachers who were enrolled in the Summer Principals Academy graduate program for aspiring teacher leaders at Teacher College, Columbia University between 2008 and 2012. Participants completed self-reported measures of the use of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression, job satisfaction and two aspects of burnout (personal accomplishment and emotional exhaustion). Participants also completed a performance measure of Emotional Intelligence, which included a knowledge test of overall emotion regulation ability. Simultaneous hierarchical regression analyses were conducted to explore the associations between indices of emotion regulation (overall emotion regulation ability, expressive suppression and cognitive reappraisal) and job outcomes of personal accomplishment, emotional exhaustion and job satisfaction. Results indicated that emotion regulation was not a predictor of job outcomes suggesting that emotion regulation is not, in fact, a protective factor against teachers’ experience of burnout. The study begs replication, as the sample selection is not fully representative of the general teaching population (participants were highly satisfied with their jobs and were studying to become school administrators).