In this master’s thesis, we discuss the strategies of emotion regulation, general health, and the professional development of primary school teachers of the first five grades. We are interested in which strategies of emotion regulation teachers use, what their general health is like and whether there exists a connection between the use of different strategies for emotion regulation and general health. Furthermore, we set out to find whether there are differences among teachers with different length of service in terms of frequency of emotion regulation and the quality of general health. The theoretical part of the thesis is where we define emotions and the process of emotion regulation as well as describe Gross and Thompson’s (2007) model of emotion regulation in detail. Hereafter, we define general health, describe its features and present research findings from the field of teachers’ general health. Afterwards, we define the professional development of teachers with its phases and describe in detail the developmental S-model of teaching career (Javrh, 2007), which was designed specifically for Slovenian area. In the empirical part, we describe the conducted research, in which 114 teachers of the first five grades from different Slovene regions took part. We gathered the data using an online questionnaire. The results showed that teachers often use strategies of attentional deployment, cognitive reappraisal of situation meaning and modification of physiological response when regulating their emotions, while seldomly using other strategies. We also established that the choice of most of the strategies for emotion regulation among teachers with different length of service does not differ. Statistically significant differences only occurred for the strategy of response modulation using psychoactive substances, which was mostly used by teachers working between one and three years. The results also showed that 56 % of teachers had had fewer impairments regarding general health, while 6 % had had greater impairments. Most teachers declared that their general health was at the time of answering the questionnaires the same as it had been in the past. There were no statistically significant differences in terms of general health among teachers with different length of service. The connection between strategies of emotion regulation and the teachers’ general health was, for the most part, statistically insignificant. The results from the research enable us to better understand teachers’ emotion regulation, their general health, and their interconnectivity. Finally, the results form a basis for spreading awareness about the importance of effective emotion expression in teachers at their work and of their general health.
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