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Paper short abstract:

By investigating the generation and elimination of Chinese teachers' negative emotions, this research seeks to reveal Chinese teachers' daily emotional labor mechanism and shape a three-dimensional and comprehensive image of teachers' community.

Paper long abstract:

There is a long history of respecting teachers in Chinese traditional society for people regard teachers as knowledge authorities and exemplars. However, traditional expectations lead to solidification and one-sidedness of teachers' dispassionate social image. One evidence is that little attention has been paid to Chinese teachers' emotional practice. This research focused on Chinese teachers' negative emotions. By investigating the generation and elimination of Chinese teachers' negative emotions, I seek to reveal Chinese teachers' emotional labor mechanism and shape a three-dimensional and comprehensive image of teachers' community. I conducted a qualitative research and adopted the ethnography approach by one-on-one semi-structured interview with nine Chinese teachers. The interview contained questions about teacher' interactions with their students, family and other social relations to investigate their emotions generated during these interactions. Research findings are as follows. First, Chinese teachers suffer from various negative emotions such as disappointment and anger, anxiety and shame or grievance and exhaustion in different working contexts. Although teachers may struggle with negative emotions, they will positively adopt various emotional regulatory strategies to eliminate negative emotions. Finally, I highlighted the emotional and psychological support from their social relations. In this research, I argued that because of frequent emotional display, high attentiveness, various displayed emotions and emotional dissonance during teachers' working process, Chinese teachers bear high emotional labor costs. Although they try to use various emotional regulatory strategies and social support, Chinese teachers' efforts to eliminate negative emotions and keep positive social image will take up much emotional labor costs.