Abstract:

Emotion regulation and their experience, according to Gross (2015), causes individuals to experience changes in the dynamics, duration, and rate of emotion occurrence, as well as changes in the consequences elicited by the emotion (in behaviour, experience, and physiology). The teaching profession is undoubtedly one in which the ability to regulate emotions is used daily. Muehlbacher, Hagenauer and Keller (2022), for example, argue based on their research that teachers should hide their negative emotions from their students to appear professional and not unnecessarily burden students. Thus, several authors consider emotion regulation a core competency for teachers (Brackett, Palomera, Mojsa-Kaja, Reyes, & Salovey, 2010; Gkonou & Mercer, 2017).

One of the concepts of emotion regulation is the approach of Gratz and Roemer (2004), who focused on difficulties in emotion regulation, whose Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale was also used in our research on Slovak teachers. This scale maps six types of difficulties: Non-acceptance of emotional responses, Difficulty engaging in goal-directed behaviour, Impulse control difficulties, Lack of emotional awareness, Limited access to emotion regulation strategies and Lack of emotional clarity.

Our research aimed to map the existing state of difficulties in emotion regulation in the Slovak population of teachers and to compare individual difficulties among teachers with different lengths of experience (novice, expert and burnout teachers). It was a quantitative research design with a comparative research character. The research population consisted of 900 Slovak teachers (AMage=47.01; SD=10.56; 12% men) who assessed their emotion regulation strategies using the DERS scale (Gratz, Roemer, 2004, Slovak translation Pilárik, Virostková Nábělková, Kaliská and Heinzová, 2022).

The results of our research bring the finding that in the population of Slovak teachers, the highest scores were achieved in the subscales of Limited access to emotion regulation strategies (AM=16.28; SD= 5.95), Lack of emotional awareness (AM=13.28; SD=3.95) and Difficulty engaging in goal-directed behaviour (AM=13.22; SD=4.40). The lowest scores were achieved in the DERS subscale Impulse control difficulties (AM= 12.53; SD=4.67). Comparisons among teachers with different years of experience showed that Slovak novice teachers, compared to burned-out teachers, tended to have more difficulty accepting their emotions (DERS total Cohen's d= 0.356***), more difficulty maintaining attention or achieving goals (Cohen's d=0.332***), and also more difficulty regulating their impulses and behaviour (Cohen's d=0.398***). These teachers have a more limited repertoire of emotion regulation strategies and cannot clearly understand their emotions. Moderate and low substantive significance differences were obtained for novice teachers compared to expert teachers. The fact that novice teachers also scored the highest for the entire DERS suggests that they have the most significant overall difficulty regulating their emotions. From this fact, it is crucial in preparation, but equally in all professional development, to focus on developing teachers' abilities to regulate their emotions appropriately and adaptively. These findings also underscore the need for further research to keep the audience engaged and interested.

Keywords:

Teachers, difficulties in emotional regulation, length of teaching experience.