Teachers' emotion regulation strategies and preschool expulsion risk: Suppression and reappraisal

Teacher stress has been implicated in decision-making related to preschool children's expulsion risk. The current study examines whether teachers' emotion regulation strategies moderate the relationship between child behavior and expulsion risk. In the study, 44 preschool teachers (68% lead and 32% assistant) completed surveys on their own emotion regulation strategies and child behavior (inhibitory control), student-teacher conflict, and expulsion risk for four randomly selected students in their classroom (n = 176). In multilevel models, higher inhibitory control was related to lower total expulsion risk and subscales of classroom disruption and stress in random slope models, controlling for student-teacher conflict and child gender. In conditional models, teachers' use of suppression moderated the link between inhibitory control and classroom disruption (p = .032) and reappraisal moderated the link between inhibitory control and child-related stress (p = -.016), supporting the exploration of teachers' emotion regulation as a critical aspect of expulsion prevention.