Do Quality Teacher-Student Relationships Protect Teachers from Emotional Exhaustion? The Mediating Role of Enjoyment and Anger

Teaching can be an emotionally exhausting profession, thus mechanisms that protect teachers from feeling emotionally overextended need to be investigated. In two studies, we examined the indirect role teacher-student relationships have on teachers' level of emotional exhaustion through teachers' experiences of enjoyment and anger. In the first, we used a latent path analysis to examine the indirect effect of teacher-perceived (N = 266) teacher-student-relationships on teachers' emotional exhaustion in a cross-sectional design. In the second study, we extended these findings to a longitudinal design that utilized student perceptions and replicated the indirect effect of teacher-student relationships on teachers' (N = 69) emotional exhaustion using student (N = 1643) perceptions of teacher-student relationships. The results from both studies indicated that high quality teacher-student relationships help protect teachers from being emotionally exhausted through increasing the amount of enjoyment and decreasing the amount of anger they experienced in the classroom.