This master’s thesis discusses guilt and its regulation strategies in primary school teachers. The main purpose of the thesis was to examine how often and in which situations primary school teachers experience guilt and how often they think about it at home. Furthermore, this thesis explores the effect of guilt on a teacher’s job and if the use of different guilt regulation strategies is associated with their overall job satisfaction. The theoretical part first summarizes the basic emotional characteristics, namely their definition, group classification, functions and domains. Then, a special group of emotions, called social emotions or emotions of self-awareness, is introduced. This group of emotions is significant for our work because we place the central emotion of our research, guilt, into this group. Following the guilt definition, there is a presentation of emotion regulation strategies by Gross and Thompson (2007) and a description of a teacher’s experience, expression and regulation of emotions (guilt). The final part of theoretical background presents the connection between a teacher’s job satisfaction and his/her experience of guilt in the classroom. The empirical part of this master’s thesis consists of the research plan and then describes the data obtained. Our survey includes a questionnaire completed by one hundred primary school teachers from different Slovenian primary schools. A structured interview with five randomly selected classroom teachers was also conducted in the research. The analysis of the data obtained through the questionnaire and the interview revealed, that the majority of primary school teachers rarely experience guilt while doing their job and also rarely think about that experience of guilt at home. The effects of guilt on teachers differ from positive to negative. Teachers reported that the most common cause of experiencing guilt were situations with students. They use a variety of guilt regulation strategies, but the most frequent one among our teachers has proven to be the strategy of response modulation through the social support. In our case, we found no association between the use of different guilt regulation strategies and teacher's job satisfaction. The findings of our research provide a better understanding of guilt and its regulation in teachers. Our research could be used as a basis for research in the field of emotions (guilt) with teachers and students of educational studies.
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