Perceived teacher emotions additionally contributed to explaining intra-individual variations of students' state emotions during instructional interaction.
Indeed, studies investigating relations between teacher emotions and perceived teaching characteristics suggest that "joyful" teachers offer more cognitively stimulating and coherent lessons, grant more room for student activities and questions and provide more exciting lectures (Frenzel et al. 2009b).
Such studies point to the criticality of suppression of teacher emotions.
To shed more light on the emotional display of teacher educators, we conducted a study on the teacher student relationship, and associated teacher emotions as they arise during teaching at university.
The first interview focused on teacher emotions and emotion display when teaching and interacting with students generally (example interview question: "Do you show and express your feelings while teaching and interacting with students or do you also hide them sometimes? Could you explain?" followed by probes).
These teachers' views about the functionality of certain emotion-display strategies were inevitably subjective, and may have benefited from triangulation using indicators that take into account the social nature of teaching and learning, and address the interplay between teachers' emotion display and students' (emotional) reactions, and vice versa.
For teachers, emotion is our lever.
Researchers therefore seek to understand the roles that teachers' emotions and instructional behaviours play for promoting activity-related enjoyment among their students.
Becker et al. (2014) analysed experience-sampling data from 149 students in grade 9 classes, who rated their teachers' emotions (joy, anger and anxiety), instructional behaviours and their own emotions during 15 lessons in four academic subjects.
Therefore, the second objective of our study is to explore possible differential relationships of teachers' emotions and instructional behaviours with their student emotions, depending on the structural contexts in which they unfold.
