Kindergarten teachers' emotion regulation, emotional job demands, and emotional exhaustion: A multilevel latent profile analysis

Although teacher emotion regulation has been widely studied, little research has jointly examined intrapersonal and interpersonal emotion regulation or how teacher-level profiles are distributed across kindergartens. Using data from 826 teachers (99.4% women, M = 7.55 years of teaching experience, SD = 5.74) nested within 76 Chinese kindergartens, this study applied multilevel latent profile analysis to identify emotion regulation profiles at the teacher and school levels and examine their associations with emotional job demands and emotional exhaustion. Three teacher-level profiles were identified: Moderate-Use Regulators, Low-Use Regulators, and High-Use Regulators. Two school-level profiles were identified: Moderate-Low Use Schools and Moderate-High Use Schools. Higher job demands were associated with greater odds of membership in the High-Use teacher profile and the Moderate-High school profile. High-Use Regulators reported lower emotional exhaustion than the other two teacher profiles, while Moderate-Low Use Schools reported higher school-mean exhaustion than Moderate-High Use Schools. Suppression showed fewer differences across teacher profiles than reappraisal and interpersonal strategies. These findings advance a culturally situated and multilevel understanding of kindergarten teachers' emotion regulation and emphasize the value of examining both individual strategy configurations and their distribution across kindergartens.