Expressing and regulating emotions of anger, fear, and sadness of teachers in the adapted programme with a lower educational standard

The master's thesis researches the areas of expressing and regulating the emotions of anger, fear and sadness in teachers in an adapted education program with a lower educational standard. First, it focuses on the definition and meaning of emotions and on the characteristics of emotions and their classification. It describes the most common explanations of emotions. It then focuses on the emotions of anger, fear and sadness, and on their characteristics. It describes emotional awareness, and the expression and regulation of emotions, with an emphasis on emotion regulation strategies and their effectiveness. As the research studied the emotions of teachers in an adapted education program with a lower educational standard, the thesis describes this program and the students involved in it, as well as the previous research in the field of teachers' emotions. The purpose of the research was to analyze situations that arouse emotions of anger, fear and sadness in teachers and to determine how and with what strategies they regulate their emotions while working in the classroom, and what the characteristics of the strategies used to regulate these three emotions are. The research involved 30 teachers who teach in an adapted education program with a lower educational standard. The results showed that teachers experience emotions of anger, fear and sadness in different situations, but that most often they experience anger due to students' behavioral problems, fear due to the possibility of students' injuries, and sadness due to the students' difficult social and family conditions. While emotions of sadness, fear and anger can be expressed verbally and non-verbally, they are sometimes suppressed or not expressed at all. Teachers use various strategies for regulating emotions, such as situation modification, reappraisal, reshaping the physiological response, and reshaping behavior by seeking social support and suppression. Emotion regulation strategies vary in frequency of use depending on the emotion teachers experience. In regulating the emotion of anger, teachers most often mentioned the following strategies: situation modification, reappraisal, and reshaping the physiological response; in regulating the emotion of fear, teachers most often opted for combinations of different strategies, while in regulating the emotion of sadness they usually went with reappraisal. There are differences between individual emotions according to the use of individual strategies for regulating them and their short-term and long-term effectiveness, as well as the automaticity of choosing an individual strategy. According to teachers, suppression, for example, proved to be effective both in the long term and short term in managing anger, while the teachers rated it as the least effective in the short-term management of sadness. The results of the research show that in the future it would make sense to identify strategies for regulating individual emotions and not all emotions at the same time.