Fynes-Clinton Samuel, Sherwell Chase, Ziaei Maryam, York Ashley, O'Connor Emma Sanders, Forrest Kylee, Flynn Libby, Bower Julie, Reutens David, Carroll Annemaree
Centre for Advanced Imaging, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia.
School of Education, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia.
NPJ Sci Learn. 2022 Apr 20;7(1):5. doi: 10.1038/s41539-022-00123-0.
Teacher stress and burnout has been associated with low job satisfaction, reduced emotional wellbeing, and poor student learning outcomes. Prolonged stress is associated with emotion dysregulation and has thus become a focus of stress interventions. 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. 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. Participants viewed general or teacher specific words of either negative or neutral valence and were required to count the number of words on screen. Behavioural and neuroimaging results suggest that teachers are able to control emotional responses to negative stimuli, as no evidence of emotional interference was detected. 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. Further, we identified that greater emotion dysregulation was associated with increased activation of regions involved in cognitive control processes during neutral word trials. 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. Future research should explore emotion regulation strategy use in teachers and utilise temporally sensitive neuroimaging techniques to further understand these findings.
教师压力和职业倦怠与工作满意度低、情绪健康状况下降以及学生学习成绩不佳有关。长期压力与情绪调节障碍有关,因此已成为压力干预的重点。本研究考察了一组高压力教师中的情绪干扰效应,并探讨认知控制、情绪调节障碍和情绪识别方面的个体差异如何与神经激活模式相关。49名承受中度至高度压力的教师参与了一项情绪计数斯特鲁普任务,同时使用功能磁共振成像对他们的大脑活动进行成像。参与者观看具有负面或中性效价的一般或特定于教师的词语,并被要求数屏幕上词语的数量。行为和神经成像结果表明,教师能够控制对负面刺激的情绪反应,因为未检测到情绪干扰的证据。然而,神经激活模式显示,在负面任务条件下,参与认知重评的区域早期共同参与,而仅在数特定于教师的负面词语时,海马体后期有独特的参与。此外,我们发现,在中性词语试验期间,更大的情绪调节障碍与参与认知控制过程的区域激活增加有关。还发现,情绪识别表现较慢的教师在与视觉和词语处理相关的区域有更大的激活,特别是在任务的特定于教师的负面词语条件下。未来的研究应探索教师使用的情绪调节策略,并利用对时间敏感的神经成像技术来进一步理解这些发现。