Interventions designed to address teacher stress vary greatly in approach considering the multivariate nature of teacher stress 21. Although reducing sources of teacher stress is important, training teachers to develop and employ strategies aimed at building resilience could have a more broad and sustained impact on overall job satisfaction and emotional wellbeing. While external factors play a large role in teacher stress, individual resilience to stress and burnout is an important predictor of teacher wellbeing 19, 20. As well as contributing to burnout and attrition, teacher stress has been associated with reduced teacher self-efficacy 16, 17 and student learning outcomes 18. Sources of teacher stress are varied, with commonly cited causes being high workload and time pressure 9, 10, the highly interpersonal nature of the job 11, 12, 13, role ambiguity and conflicts 14, and the large emotional demands placed on teachers 15. The retention of qualified educators is a global concern 7 that has been investigated through many diverse theoretical approaches 8. Teaching has been identified as one of the most stressful professions 1, 2, 3, and teacher stress and burnout has become recognised as a major contributor to rates of teacher attrition 4, 5, 6. Future research should explore emotion regulation strategy use in teachers and utilise temporally sensitive neuroimaging techniques to further understand these findings. Teachers who showed slower emotion recognition performance were also found to have greater activation in regions associated with visual and word processing, specifically during the teacher specific negative word condition of the task. Further, we identified that greater emotion dysregulation was associated with increased activation of regions involved in cognitive control processes during neutral word trials. However, patterns of neural activation revealed early shared engagement of regions involved in cognitive reappraisal during negative task conditions and unique late engagement of the hippocampus only while counting teacher-specific negative words. Behavioural and neuroimaging results suggest that teachers are able to control emotional responses to negative stimuli, as no evidence of emotional interference was detected. Participants viewed general or teacher specific words of either negative or neutral valence and were required to count the number of words on screen. Forty-nine teachers suffering moderate-high stress participated in an emotional counting Stroop task while their brain activity was imaged using functional magnetic resonance imaging. This study examines emotional interference effects in a group of teachers suffering from high stress and to explore how individual differences in cognitive control, emotion dysregulation, and emotion recognition related to patterns of neural activation. Prolonged stress is associated with emotion dysregulation and has thus become a focus of stress interventions.
Teacher stress and burnout has been associated with low job satisfaction, reduced emotional wellbeing, and poor student learning outcomes.