This study aimed to find out the correlations between in-service teachers’ emotional, burnout and job satisfaction in Turkey. To this end, the Teacher Emotion Inventory (TEI), Job Satisfaction Questionnaire and Maslach Burnout Inventory were administered to 564 in-service teachers in a wide range of disciplines. According to confirmatory factor analysis, the five-factor model of TEI was successfully confirmed within the current study. In addition, joy and love dimensions exhibited positive correlations with job satisfaction. The love and fear dimensions significantly predicted job satisfaction with a medium effect. Love, sadness, and fear dimensions significantly predicted teachers’ burnout with a medium effect.

Introduction

Teacher emotion is an interrelated and intermediating term among several variables such as job satisfaction, burnout, identity, cognition and competencies in that the more the teacher becomes aware of his/her emotional experience, the more rapport s/he can build with colleagues and the more s/he can cope with the dehumanization of teaching career in some contexts (Shapiro, 2010). Despite these interrelationships, emotions in educational research have been disregarded for a long time. The reasons for the dearth of research in this area might be the difficulty in defining and assessing the subjective emotional aspects of learning compared to the more objective and relatively more observable cognitive aspects such as thinking, motivation, metacognition and professional aspects like identity formation (Karlsson, 2013; Shapiro, 2010; Timostsuk & Ugaste, 2012), professional development (Golombek & Doran, 2014), burnout (Fiorilli, Albanese, Gabola, & Pepe, 2017), and self-efficacy (Penrose, Perry, & Ball, 2007). In a nutshell, Frenzel and Stephens (2013, p. 5) acknowledge the complexity of emotions and define them as “multidimensional constructs comprising affective, psychological, cognitive, expressive, and motivational components”. Teachers are involved in different social interactions in classroom settings and it is important for them to establish a good relationship with their students and understand their students’ mental states through mentalization (Swan & Riley, 2015).