Teachers' Regulation of Positive Emotions and Its Association With Burnout—Results of a Diary Study in the Team‐Teaching Setting

ABSTRACT This study focuses on teachers' regulation of positive emotions and experiences of burnout in the collaborative team‐teaching setting. Team teachers experience a variety of positive emotions that they consequently regulate daily in the classroom. Because teachers' emotion regulation has theoretically and empirically been linked to their occupational health, team teachers' regulation of positive emotions might have a possibly preventative function against burnout‐related symptoms. Drawing on the process model of emotion regulation and the concept of socially shared emotion regulation, we hypothesise that team teachers' daily regulation of positive emotions (i.e., reappraisal, suppression, authentic display, sharing, humour) is related to their daily burnout experiences (i.e., emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation, reduced accomplishment). Forty‐seven Austrian team teachers completed 652 entries in a diary study. Results of multilevel regression analyses indicate that the regulation of positive emotions shows significant associations with burnout along the hypothesised directions on the within‐ and between‐person level. We discuss the role of the regulation of positive emotions for teacher burnout.