It is important for teachers involved in school education to possess not only academic knowledge and instructional skills, but also the capacity for conducting good emotional interactions with children. Research suggests that the quality of a teacher’s emotional contact with children greatly influences the children’s education (Hamre & Pianta, 2005). Recently, the importance of exploring teachers’ emotions has become the focus of increasing attention by educational researchers throughout the world (Nias, 1996; Schutz & Pekrun, 2007). However, there is little information about how teachers express their emotions when interacting with children. It is predicated that the skill of expressing emotions would influence how a teacher conducts classroom instructions, classroom management, and handle children’s misbehavior. This study took the first step in investigating the emotion expressions of elementary school teachers, and the processes of regulating emotions when interacting with children, from the perspective of the emotional competence of the teachers.

Emotional competence, or emotional intelligence, includes the ability to perceive and express emotions, to understand and use them, and to manage emotions (Mayer & Salovey, 1997; Saarni, 1999). Managing emotions involves managing emotions in others to promote emotional and intellectual growth and well-being (Salovey, Detweiler-Bedell, Detweiler-Bedell, & Mayer, 2008). Saani (1999) also included the ability to differentiate inner emotional states and outer expressions and to understand that one’s emotionally expressive behaviors may have an impact on others. Thus, in human interactions, how a person regulates and expresses emotions, which is the focus of the present study, reflects the person’s emotional competence.

The research question of the study was: What characterizes the emotional expressions of good teachers in Japanese schools, and how do they regulate their emotions in front of children? Emotion expressions that teachers show children in class may be different from the emotions that they actually experience, because they regulate their emotions. Moreover, good teachers may have developed strategies for emotion regulation during teaching. An understanding of how good teachers interact with children will be enormously beneficial both for the development of children and for the professional development of teachers. In the light of the findings, the association between the emotional competence of good teachers and teaching is discussed.

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