An exploration of the relationships between elementary school teachers’ humor styles and their emotional labor

Teaching and Teacher Education 87 (2020) 102950

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An exploration of the relationships between elementary school teachers’ humor styles and their emotional labor Yu-Hsiu Liao a, Si-Yu Luo b, Meng-Hua Tsai a, Hsueh-Chih Chen a, c, d, e, * a

Department of Educational Psychology and Counseling, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan In-Service Master Program of Creativity Development, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan c Institute for Research Excellence in Learning Sciences, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan d Chinese Language and Technology Center, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan e MOST AI Biomedical Research Center, Taipei, Taiwan b

h i g h l i g h t s
Primary teachers’ affiliative and self-enhancing humor had positive relationships with deep and genuine acting.
The same respondents’ aggressive humor and self-defeating humor were negatively correlated with genuine acting.
The results can help to raise awareness of teaching’s emotional demands.

a r t i c l e i n f o

a b s t r a c t

Article history: Received 22 June 2018 Received in revised form 30 September 2019 Accepted 5 October 2019 Available online xxx

Teaching requires emotional labor. Humor is a promising but under-explored means of coping with such labor. A questionnaire was administered to 302 primary teachers to assess three kinds of emotional labor (surface, deep, and genuine acting) and four humor styles: two adaptive (affiliative and self-enhancing) and two maladaptive (aggressive and self-defeating). Affiliative and self-enhancing humor were positively correlated with emotional labor, whereas aggressive and self-defeating humor were negatively correlated with such labor. These results can help raise awareness of teaching’s emotional demands, and encourage teacher-training and professional-development programs to showcase appropriate ways, including humor, of coping with workplace emotions. © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Humor styles Emotional labor Teachers’ well-being Primary school

1. Introduction Over the past two decades, a growing body of scholarly literature on teachers’ emotions (e.g., Day & Lee, 2011; Prosen, Vitulic, & Skraban, 2011) has highlighted teaching’s status as an emotionally demanding profession (Hargreaves, 2003; Leithwood, Harris, & Hopkins, 2008; Tsang, 2012). Teachers’ contributions to their students’ lives are undeniably personal as well as academic (Pianta & Allen, 2008), and entail emotion e even passion (Carbonneau,
n, Vallerand, Fernet, & Guay, 2008; Moe, 2016; Ruiz-Alfonso & Leo 2016) e as well as the transmission of knowledge, skills, and

* Corresponding author. Department of Educational Psychology and Counseling, Institute for Research Excellence in Learning Sciences, Chinese Language and Technology Center, National Taiwan Normal University, 106, No.129 Sec.1 Heping E. Road, Taipei, Taiwan. E-mail address: [email protected] (H.-C. Chen). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2019.102950 0742-051X/© 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

cognitive strategies (Day, 2004). As such, teachers experience a steady stream of emotional demands from students, students’ parents, colleagues, and school administrators (Cross & Hong, 2012), and are required to manage their own emotions effectively as an aspect of their professional competence (Lee & Yin, 2011). Given that teachers’ positive emotions are positively correlated with the quality of their teaching and of their students’ learning (Frenzel, 2014; Hagenauer & Volet, 2014; Ruzek et al., 2016), teachers’ psychological well-being would seem to be central to teaching effectiveness. The teaching profession is also characterized by emotional labor: the management of feelings and self-presentation to fulfill the €ring, Brie €t, & Brouwers, requirements of a job (Hochschild, 1983; Na 2006). If a person performs little or no emotional labor, i.e., refuses to display appropriate emotions and facial expressions, he/she may be perceived as unfit for the job (Thoits, 1990); and thus, to fulfill their work requirements, teachers may change their voices and

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facial expressions when communicating with students, parents and colleagues. These changes may be reinforced or intensified by the centrality of the ethic of care to teachers’ professional norms. However, the care students receive from their teachers, whether personal or academic, is not directly parallel to the care service providers accord to their customers, chiefly for material gain (O’Connor, 2008; Yin, 2016). It should also be noted that, despite research on emotion-regulation strategies having focused chiefly on the regulation of negative emotions, teachers regulate their positive emotions as well (Taxer & Frenzel, 2015). This distinctive aspect of teachers’ emotional labor may help explain prior research findings that their faking or suppressing of emotions was negatively related to their well-being (e.g., Frenzel et al., 2016). Humor can serve as an adaptive mechanism for helping people cope with their emotions (Martin, 2001), thus benefiting their wellbeing (Ruch, 1998). As such, it may help to maintain or improve teachers’ physical and psychological health, despite the high emotional demands of their work environments. Humor is not unitary, however. It can be divided into different styles, which are more or less appropriate to various day-to-day situations, and more or less beneficial or detrimental to their users or to others (Martin, Puhlik-Doris, Larsen, Gray, & Weir, 2003). Yet, despite the variety of humor styles that people use, each individual is fairly consistent in how he/she uses humor over time (Ruch, 1998); and individual differences in humor styles have been linked to differences in health, well-being and relationships (Martin et al., 2003). Like others, teachers have individual humor styles which, like emotional labor, are associated to some extent with their psychological well-being. Primary school is a distinct context with respect to emotional climate as well as organization, students, and staff (Stephanou & Oikonomou, 2018). That is, primary teachers usually establish closer emotional bonds with their students as a foundation for teaching and learning, and regulate their emotions more often, as compared to teachers of other levels (Hargreaves, 2000). Thus, primary teaching is a profession characterized by high levels of emotional exhaustion (Chang, 2009). Nevertheless, research examining the relationships between primary teachers’ humor styles and their emotional labor has been rare, and this gap in the literature would appear to be a fruitful field of inquiry both theoretically and practically. 2. Literature review 2.1. Humor styles Humor is a multi-faceted construct, involving cognitional, emotional, behavioral, psycho-physiological and social components (Martin, 2001; Martin & Lefcourt, 1983). It can be seen as a stable personality trait or an individual-difference variable (Ruch, 1998). As well as psychosocial well-being, as noted above, it has been argued that humor is connected to physical health (Crawford & Caltabiano, 2011; Kuiper & McHale, 2009). Freud (1960) indicated that it was ultimately a mechanism of self-defense: i.e., that adopting a humorous perspective can regulate negative emotions and alleviate harmful feelings. Thus, the use of humor can be seen as a healthy defense mechanism that enables one to desist from negative emotions and sustain a realistic outlook on unwelcome situations ((Huang & Lee, 2019; Martin, Kuiper, Olinger, & Dance, 1993). Different styles of humor are differentially associated with psychological well-being (Maslow, 1970; Vaillant, 1995). Based on a categorization of their functions, Martin et al. (2003) classified humor styles into two adaptive types e affiliative and self-enhancing humor e and two maladaptive ones: aggressive and self-defeating humor. Affiliative humor involves using jokes in a benevolent,

friendly manner to facilitate group cohesion. Self-enhancing humor entails maintaining a good-natured and humorous attitude in stressful or otherwise adverse situations. Aggressive humor consists of insulting others; and self-defeating humor refers to behaving comically and/or saying derogatory things about oneself as a means of enhancing interpersonal relationships. In general, people’s choices of humor styles have some impact on their relationships and further influence their psychological states (Chan et al., 2018; Martin et al., 2003). A number of studies have reported that humor-style preferences are associated with differences in both personality traits (e.g., Vernon, Martin, Schermer, & Mackie, 2008) and psychological well-being (Cann & Collette, 2014; Kazarian & Martin, 2006; Sirigatti, Penzo, Giannetti, & Stefanile, 2014). Affiliative and self-enhancing humor, for instance, have been found to be correlated positively with extraversion and openness, whereas the aggressive and selfdefeating styles have been correlated negatively with agreeableness, but positively and very closely with arrogance and manipulation (Markey, Suzuki, & Marino, 2014; Vernon et al., 2008). Individuals with stable high self-esteem tend to use affiliative humor more often, and aggressive and self-defeating humor less often, than others do (Vaughan, Zeigler-Hill, & Arnau, 2014). Moreover, individuals’ heavy use of self-defeating humor may result in them developing maladaptive social-support networks that impede their psychological well-being (Kuiper & McHale, 2009). Similarly, Sirigatti et al. (2014) found psychological wellbeing to be negatively associated with self-defeating humor, but positively associated with affiliative and self-enhancing humor. As a whole, then, adaptive humor styles appear to be positively connected both to positive personality traits and to individuals’ wellbeing (Jovanovic, 2011; Kuiper & McHale, 2009). Teachers who use humor in their teaching are generally rated as effective or satisfying in terms of their presentation of lessons, their ability to motivate their classes, and their students’ tension levels (e.g., Ellingson, 2018; Makewa, Role, & Genga, 2011; Werth, 2017). However, studies dealing with teachers’ humor styles have been rare. Among a sample of 283 university lecturers, Tümkaya (2007) found that affiliative and self-enhancing humor had significantly negative relationships with potentially harmful variables including emotional exhaustion and depersonalization, while aggressive and self-defeating humor were both positively and significantly correlated with burnout. Kuiper and McHale (2009) found that the use of affiliative humor appeared to facilitate the building of socialsupport networks, and thus indirectly enhanced the well-being of secondary-school teachers. And similarly, Ho (2016) reported that among 539 primary- and secondary-school teachers, affiliative and self-enhancing humor were correlated negatively with emotional exhaustion and depersonalization, but positively with accomplishment, and that affiliative humor moderated the stress arising from depersonalization. Nevertheless, scholars’ inattention to the relationships among humor styles and primary-school teachers’ emotional labor means that more research is warranted. 2.2. Emotional labor According to Hochschild’s (1983) characterization of emotional labor, competent workers are expected to change their emotions while engaging in face-to-face or voice-to-voice interaction with customers, colleagues, and superiors at work. Regardless of whether they perceive such changes as genuine, employees involved in emotional labor are required to follow display rules: i.e., express the expected emotions, while also suppressing any other emotions that might impede, or be viewed as impeding, their work performance. These rules are affected by general social, occupational and organizational norms (Grandey, 2000).

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Three main strategies e surface acting, deep acting and genuine acting e are used in this process of emotional regulation. In surface acting, a person feigns the expected emotion while not really feeling it, whereas deep acting means attempting to actually experience the emotions one is required to display in a job (Hochschild, 1983). Lastly, genuine acting denotes employees’ expression of their true feelings without regard for display rules (Ashforth & Humphrey, 1993; Ye & Chen, 2015). Although describable as a state of “emotional harmony” (Wong & Wang, 2009, p. 250), genuine acting is classified as a form of acting because the employees who use it may still have to expend effort to ensure that their emotional performances are consistent with their organizations’ expectations (Diefendorff, Croyle, & Gosserand, 2005). Past studies have shown that emotional labor is strongly and positively correlated with emotional exhaustion (e.g., Goldberg & Grandey, 2007; Kruml & Geddes, 2000; Mikolajczak, Menil, & Luminet, 2007) and that it is also a negative predictor of wellbeing (Hülsheger & Schewe, 2011). It has been argued that emotional labor may impair service providers’ well-being (Grandey, 2000), while surface acting in particular has been €ring et al., 2006), negative moods, linked to depersonalization (Na increased emotional exhaustion, and decreased job satisfaction (Judge, Woolf, & Hurst, 2009). Deep acting, on the other hand, appears to be unrelated to job satisfaction, though it has been associated with lower positive affect (Judge et al., 2009). And, among teachers specifically, sustained emotional labor has been associated with lower levels of sympathy and higher levels of cynicism towards students (Kinman, Wray, & Strange, 2011). Nevertheless, emotional labor’s impact is not negative across the board. Deep acting and genuine acting were found to be beneficial to well-being by Gabriel and Diefendorff (2015), who reported that employees who were encouraged to engage in these types of acting were better at fulfilling their work expectations. Similarly, Iszatt-White (2013) found that deep acting and genuine acting could increase psychological well-being if they were in accord with one’s social and personal identity (see also Ashforth & Humphrey, 1993). And, according to a meta-analysis of emotionallabor studies by Kammeyer-Mueller et al. (2013), deep acting had a positive relationship not only with job satisfaction and job performance, but also with customer satisfaction (Hülsheger & Schewe, 2011). As such, emotional labor may have positive outcomes, especially if employees are given a relatively high level of autonomy and adopt positive display rules (Humphrey, Ashforth, & Diefendorff, 2015). Teaching, which involves substantial emotional activity (Hargreaves, 1998), has itself been characterized as a form of emotional labor (Kinman et al., 2011). As noted above, this profession entails intense efforts to regulate emotions, due to school contexts’ elaborate display rules (Chen, 2016; Cross & Hong, 2012). Extensive research on teachers’ emotions, conducted at various levels of education (e.g. Keller, Chang, Becker, Goetz, & Frenzel, 2014; Loh & Liew, 2016; Yin, Huang, & Lee, 2017), has found that their performance of emotional labor affects their resilience (e.g., Day & Gu, 2009; Hong, 2012), psychological well-being (e.g., Philipp & Schüpbach, 2010), teaching beliefs, work satisfaction, and self-esteem (e.g., Isenbarger & Zembylas, 2006; Kinman et al., 2011). Research focusing on teachers’ emotional labor has also linked it €ring et al., 2006). Howwith stress and emotional exhaustion (Na ever, Philipp and Schüpbach (2010) reported that deep acting reduced teachers’ perceptions of emotional exhaustion, and thus benefited their health. Surface acting, on the other hand, has been positively linked with emotional job demands as well as emotional

3

€ring et al., 2006). Additionally, Keller et al. (2014) exhaustion (Na found that negative emotions such as anger evoked more emotional labor than enjoyment and anxiety did, and that 99% of the teachers in their sample enjoyed all the lessons they taught. This could imply that most teachers are likely to say they enjoy teaching, regardless of its high emotional demands that may hinder both their professional performance and their care for their students in a wider sense. Moreover, constant emotional labor may lead teachers to depersonalize their students, and thus to adopt to less caring and more censorious attitudes towards them; and more experienced teachers have reported higher levels of emotional labor (Kinman et al., 2011). 3. Hypothesis development Based on the foregoing discussion, it would seem that emotional labor plays an important role in teachers’ emotions, and thus their attitudes towards their work and their students (see especially Keller et al., 2014; Philipp & Schüpbach, 2010). Individuals’ choices of humor styles, meanwhile, have impacts on their relationships and thus on their psychological states (Martin et al., 2003). However, the relationship between teachers’ emotional-labor strategies and their humor styles remains unclear and under-researched. It is reasonable to expect that there will be a close association between emotional labor and humor styles, since both involve individuals’ psychological states and well-being. Thus, the current quantitative study aims to answer the following question: Are primary teachers’ humor styles (affiliative, self-enhancing, aggressive, and selfdefeating humor) correlated with their emotional labor (surface, deep, and genuine acting), and if so, to what extent? It will test the following hypotheses: H1. Deep and genuine acting will be positively correlated with adaptive humor styles (affiliative and self-enhancing humor). H2. Surface acting will be negatively correlated with maladaptive humor styles (aggressive and self-defeating humor).” 4. Methods 4.1. Sampling procedure and participants This study’s target population comprised the 9671 full-time elementary-school teachers who were working in Taipei City, Taiwan, in September 2016. A stratified sampling approach was used to collect a representative sample of this group. Of the 337 teachers who were selected and sent questionnaires via their schools, 321 completed these instruments and returned them to the researcher in the pre-addressed, stamped envelopes that were provided: an overall response rate of 95%. The participants were informed that their participation was voluntary and that they could withdraw from the research at any time. All the information about the participants was unidentifiable. Of the 321 questionnaires received, 19 were deemed invalid (11 being incomplete, and the other eight, completely blank) leaving a final total of 302 valid responses. Of these 302, 81 (26.8%) were from men and 221 (73.2%) from women. In terms of experience, 49 (16.2%) of the respondents had taught for 10 years or less, 166 (54.9%) for 11e20 years, and 87 (28.8%) for 21 years or more. Just over half (51%) were aged 40e50, with 42% being younger, and 7%, older. 4.2. Instruments The two structured questionnaires used to collect the data were

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the Emotional Labor Scales for Elementary School Teachers (Li, Hwang, & Lu, 2012) and the Humor Styles Questionnaire, Chinese version (Chan, Chen, Cho, & Martin, 2011). Each will be discussed in turn in the following two sections. 4.2.1. Emotional labor Li et al.’s (2012) questionnaire was selected to measure emotional labor in the present study because it was previously shown to have strong validity and reliability. Comprising five items each, its five dimensions are surface acting (e.g., “I never express negative emotions when I work with students”); deep acting (e.g., “I try to actually experience the emotions that I must show to students even when in unpleasant situations”); genuine acting (e.g., “I genuinely express my true feeling of care for students”); emotional-labor norms (e.g., “It is my responsibility to express proper emotions and attitude and be the students’ model”); and emotional-labor diversity (e.g., “I have to express different emotions when meeting different people in school”). However, most emotional-labor studies have focused mainly on the first three dimensions e surface acting, deep acting, genuine acting e and the present study adopted the same approach, both to allow for clear cross-study comparisons, and due to its primary focus on how teachers perceive their emotions and attitudes toward their work. All items in this questionnaire were scored on the same five-point Likert scale, ranging from 1 (never) to 5 (always), with higher scores indicating stronger subjective feelings of emotional labor. The Cronbach’s a coefficients for the three selected acting dimensions were 0.80, 0.80, and 0.85, respectively. The validity of this scale was examined using three approaches: overall model fit, convergent validity, and discriminant validity. The fit indices used were the Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA), the Non-Normed Fit Index (NNFI), the Comparative Fit Index (CFI) and the Goodness of Fit Index (GFI). In general, the criteria for an acceptable data fit include an RMSEA value below 0.08 and other fit-index values above 0.90; and in this case, all these criteria were met. In the test of convergent validity, all the values of the standard coefficients of variation reached a significant level (p < .05), suggesting that the observed variables had good convergent validity. In the discriminant-validity test, the chi-squared values were significant, and the confidence-interval values did not include 1.00, showing that the variables in the Emotional Labor Scales had good discriminant validity. Finally, the three acting dimensions’ respective internal consistency reliability values were 0.81, 0.82, and 0.81. 4.2.2. Humor styles Chan, Chen, Cho, & Martin, 2011 Chinese-language version of Martin et al.’s (2003) Humor Styles Questionnaire comprises 32 items, divided into four eight-item subscales. Each subscale covers a distinct type of humor: affiliative (e.g., “I enjoy making people laugh”); self-enhancing (e.g., “If I am feeling upset or unhappy I usually try to think of something funny about the situation to make myself feel better”); aggressive (e.g., “When telling jokes or saying funny things, I am usually not very concerned about how other people are taking it”); and self-defeating humor (e.g., “I often try to make people like or accept me more by saying something funny about my own weaknesses, blunders, or faults”). All items in this questionnaire were scored on a seven-point Likert scale, from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (totally agree), with 11 items being reversescored. A person’s highest subscale score indicated the humor style they tended to use the most. The Cronbach’s a values of the affiliative, self-enhancing, aggressive, and self-defeating humor subscales were 0.88, 0.82, 0.73, and 0.77, respectively. The test-retest reliability scores for the same four subscales were 0.86, 0.84, 0.83, and 0.83, and their component-reliability values were 0.88, 0.83,

0.74, and 0.78. All these values signified that the internal validity of the questionnaire was good. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to validate the four humor-style subscales. In this case, RMSEA, NNFI, CFI and GFI were 0.07, 0.92, 0.92, and 0.86, respectively, all of which were acceptable. The internal consistency reliability values of the four subscales were 0.88, 0.78, 0.74, and 0.83. 4.2.3. Statistical analysis First, Pearson correlation analysis was used to identify whether there were significant relationships between humor styles and emotional labor. Descriptive statistics of the variables were then calculated. Next, t-tests were employed to identify significant differences between male and female teachers’ responses to both instruments, and structural equation modeling (SEM; Hoyle, 1995) was utilized to explore the relationships among the two sets of constructs. SEM has been described as a combination of exploratory factor analysis and multiple regression (Ullman, 2001). Given that the present study is the first to explore the relations between humor styles and emotional labor among primary teachers, we used SEM e which encompasses two components, a measurement model and a structural model (Schreiber, Nora, Stage, Barlow, & King, 2006) e to extend the possibility of identifying relationships among the latent variables. 5. Results 5.1. Descriptive statistics and correlations Table 1 displays the descriptive statistics, bivariate correlations, and Cronbach’s a values for the seven variables measured by the two instruments’ seven dimensions. Of the three emotional-labor variables, deep acting scored the highest, followed by genuine acting. The two adaptive humor styles, affiliative and selfenhancing humor, were more commonly used than either of their maladaptive counterparts. Given the high correlation among the variables within the emotional-labor construct, partial correlations were also conducted to provide more detailed information about the relationships among all variables. In Table 2, the Pearson correlation coefficients for the variables have been adjusted to take the control variables into account; the results of this process indicate that deep acting was positively correlated with self-enhancing humor and aggressive humor. Surface acting, on the other hand, had no significant relationship with any of the humor-style variables. After partialing out surface acting and genuine acting, deep acting was found to be correlated positively with self-enhancing humor and negatively with aggressive humor. Finally, after partialing out surface acting and deep acting, genuine acting was significantly and positively associated with adaptive humor styles,

Table 1 Pearson correlations, mean scores, standard deviations, and reliabilities for all variables.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Variable

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Surface acting Deep acting Genuine acting Affiliative humor Self-enhancing humor Aggressive humor Self-defeating humor

1 .59*** .12* .15* .11 -.09 .08 .81 3.98 .57

e 1 .24*** .18** .19** -.20** -.03 .82 4.08 .52

e e 1 .18** .21*** -.31*** -.16** .81 4.05 .53

e e e 1 .59*** -.15** .22*** .88 4.89 .98

e e e e 1 -.06 .18** .78 4.71 .81

e e e e e 1 .38*** .74 2.41 .73

e e e e e e 1 .83 3.10 .98

a Mean Standard deviation

Note: n ¼ 302; *p < .05; **p < .01; ***p < .001.

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Table 2 Partial correlations of all variables when controlling for surface acting, deep acting, and genuine acting. Variables

Surface acting (deep & genuine acting partialed out)

Deep acting (surface & genuine acting partialed out)

Genuine acting (surface & deep acting partialed out)

Affiliative humor Self-enhancing humor Aggressive humor Self-defeating humor

.06 .002 .02 .11

.11 .16** -.17** -.09

.16** .20** -.30*** -.17**

Note: n ¼ 302; *p < .05; **p < .01; ***p < .001.

and had a negative relationship with maladaptive humor styles. The hypotheses were supported by these results. 5.2. SEM analyses Based on the foregoing review of the prior literature, a SEM model was constructed to explore the relationships between humor styles and emotional labor. Affiliative and self-enhancing humor were combined to form its latent variable adaptive humor styles, while aggressive and self-defeating humor made up its latent variable maladaptive humor styles. All three emotional-labor strategies comprised the latent variable emotional labor. It was expected affiliative and self-enhancing humor would be significantly and positively correlated with deep and genuine acting. We used the bootstrapping method (Yung & Bentler, 1996) to evaluate the sampling variability of the estimates of the associations using AMOS 22 software. This involved drawing 5000 bootstrap samples with a 95% confidence interval. Fig. 1 and Table 3 present the SEM results regarding the associations between humor styles and emotional labor, with the latter including the values of regression weights, standard regression weights, standard errors, R2, and p for each model. As Table 3 indicates, this model achieved a good data fit (c2 (1025) ¼ 1193.7, CFI ¼ 0.98; NNFI ¼ 0.98; SRMR ¼ 0.07, RMSEA ¼ 0.02). The two adaptive humor styles were both correlated positively with each of the three focal emotional-labor/acting strategies, whereas the two maladaptive ones were negatively associated with such strategies. The relation of adaptive humor to emotional-labor strategies was particularly strong in the specific case of deep acting. Between them, adaptive humor (badaptive humor ¼ .22, p < .01) and maladaptive humor (bmaladaptive humor ¼ 0.34, p < .001) explained 17% of the variation in emotional labor. Thus, in general, this study’s hypothesis was supported. An alternative model was constructed according to the results of partial correlation shown in Table 2, in an attempt to achieve better model fit. In this alternative model, affiliative and self-enhancing humor were again combined to form its latent variable adaptive humor styles, while aggressive and self-defeating humor made up its latent variable maladaptive humor styles. However, rather than treating emotional labor as a single variable, this model divided it into two: 1) EL1, a combination of deep acting and genuine acting, which was linked only to adaptive humor, and 2) EL2, comprising only surface acting, which was linked only to maladaptive humor. However, the resulting model fit (c2(1075) ¼ 1852.26, CFI ¼ 0.90; NNFI ¼ 0.89; SRMR ¼ 0.07, RMSEA ¼ 0.04) was not as good as that of the original model. Therefore, the first model was retained. 6. Discussion Based on self-report questionnaires, the present investigation of Taiwanese primary teachers’ perceptions of the ways they used humor and the consistency of their real emotions with their behavior found significant correlations between humor styles and emotional labor. That is, the adaptive humor styles, affiliative and

self-enhancing humor, were positively associated with emotional labor, whereas the maladaptive ones, aggressive and self-defeating humor, had negative relationships with it. These results echoed those of most past research on these topics: i.e., that the use of adaptive humor could facilitate teachers’ regulation of negative emotions and their ability to cope with negative events, as well as being more effective than negative humor at regulating such emotions (e.g., Karahan, Yalcin, Erbas, & Ergun, 2019; Perchtold et al., 2019; Samson & Gross, 2012). Because adaptive humor can be used as a coping strategy to protect oneself from negative emotions (Rnic, Dozois, & Martin, 2016), it could have enabled the sampled teachers to maintain their faith in themselves when they encountered difficulties at work. Given that their attitudes towards their work were generally positive, it is plausible that they identified with it and tended to express their naturally felt emotions while in the workplace. This line of reasoning is congruent with prior findings that deep acting was positively associated with work satisfaction and work performance (Hülsheger & Schewe, 2011). Likewise, the present study’s identification of positive correlations among adaptive humor styles, deep acting, and genuine acting may suggest that the use of the former helped the respondents to fulfill their work requirements, which in turn rendered them more willing to internalize display rules. The participants’ maladaptive humor styles, on the other hand, appeared less clearly linked with any of the three focal emotionallabor strategies. Given that emotional labor is the process of managing feelings and expressions to fulfill the emotional requirements of a work environment (Hochschild, 1983), and that people who use maladaptive humor often ignore the harmful impact it might have on others or themselves, it is plausible that use of this type of humor by certain teachers is symptomatic of their disregard for the emotional requirements of the teaching profession e despite such requirements’ importance to classroom teaching and learning (Harvey & Evans, 2003; Hosotani & ImaiMatsumura, 2011). In that regard, the present results echo those of Torres-Marín, Navarro-Carrillo, and Carretero-Dios (2018), who found that maladaptive humor styles were positively correlated both with feelings of anger and the inclination to express such feelings toward other people. Of course, anger may be considered a genuine expression of emotion. Yet, considered as a failure to perform the minimal required amount of emotional labor, it usually leads to crises in teaching and harm to teachers’ psychological wellbeing (Chang, 2013; Frenzel, 2014). Additionally, those primary teachers in the present study’s sample who used maladaptive humor styles were less likely to use emotional-labor strategies, possibly implying that they disregarded the norms around restraining their emotions in their work and workplaces. However, such indifference is rare in the teaching profession, especially in Chinese cultural contexts, where teachers attach great importance to following professional and ethical norms when managing their emotions (Yin & Lee, 2012). Influenced by Confucian tradition, responsible teachers usually create an atmosphere integrating sternness and love in their classroom, and are

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Fig. 1. Structural model of the relations between teachers’ humor styles and their emotional labor. AF ¼ affiliate humor; SE ¼ self-enhancing humor; AG ¼ aggressive humor; SD ¼ self-defeating humor; AH ¼ adaptive humor; MH ¼ maladaptive humor; EL ¼ emotional labor; SA ¼ surface acting; DA ¼ deep acting; GA ¼ genuine acting.

Table 3 Structural equation modeling results for humor styles and emotional labor. Variable adaptive humor / EL Maladaptive humor / EL

unstd. coefficient

SE

std. estimate

z

.10

.05

.22*

2.05

-.19

.06

-.34***

3.43

R2 .17

Note: *p < .05; **p < .01; ***p < .001. unstd. ¼ unstandardized; SE ¼ standardized EL ¼ emotional labor.

error;

std. ¼ standardized;

inclined to use surface acting (Yin, 2016). This could help to explain why surface acting occurred so frequently in the present study’s data. However, it should be noted that this kind of love-andsternness teacher-student relationship can also be found in other cultures. For example, it shares some similarities with the ‘warm demander pedagogy’ prevalent in North America, in which love and care for students are mingled with high expectations for their

achievement (Ford & Sassi, 2014). Teachers who adopt such approaches presumably have more scope than others to harness their own negative emotions in aid of their students’ growth (Sandilos, Rimm-Kaufman, & Cohen, 2017). How individuals perceive situations or understand concepts from alternative points of view may affect their attitudes and behaviors (Gerace, Day, Casey, & Mohr, 2013), and humor styles can be seen as different ways of generating perspectives on day-to-day situations. The present research has found them to be associated, in varying degrees, with emotional-labor strategies e though three of the humor styles were significantly correlated with deep acting and genuine acting. This may indicate that teachers who identify with their work more may also have a heightened awareness of the value of utilizing adaptive humor often, and maladaptive humor rarely if ever, when teaching. Additionally, it appears from the present study’s data that teachers who often engaged in surface acting used humor at work less frequently than others did. As such, encouraging teachers to use affiliative and self-enhancing humor styles at work more often could help them to regulate their

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attitudes and behaviors, especially in light of such styles’ involvement with work identity. 7. Limitations and directions for future research Although this pioneering study has demonstrated that adaptive humor styles are closely associated with the sincerer forms of emotional labor among schoolteachers, it has several limitations that must be considered. First, its participants were recruited from a single city, which could affect the generalizability of its findings. It is conceivable that its results could be generalized to certain other groups with similar traits, e.g., Asian teachers or non-Asian primary-school teachers. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to expect that teachers in different regions will favor different humor styles and perceive their work emotions differently. Therefore, additional studies conducted in a wider range of cultural environments are warranted. And, secondly, the current research has only examined the relationships between the humor styles and emotional labor of elementary school teachers, and further research could usefully extend its methods not only to teachers of other grade levels, but to other variables such as general psychological states and relationships with family, friends and colleagues. Future research should also aim to promote the benefits of adaptive humor styles via the development of practical interventions. The links between maladaptive humor and emotional labor in the present study’s correlation model were also noteworthy: in particular, its indication that the less often teachers used maladaptive humor, the more emotional labor they tended to engage in. Often characterized as antisocial, maladaptive humor has usually been found to be negatively correlated with agreeableness and other positive personality traits (Martin et al., 2003; Schermer et al., 2017). Employees’ deep and genuine acting, on the other hand, have been found to be strongly and positively correlated with their work satisfaction (Yin, Lee, Zhang, & Jin, 2013) as well as with their willingness to identify with their organizations, display emotions consistent with their true feelings, and follow rules at work (Ashforth & Humphrey, 1993; Wu & Hu, 2013). However, it is not easy to isolate teachers’ emotional labor from their labor more generally, given that emotional rules are often disguised as ethical codes or professional norms (Yin et al., 2013). It is hoped that the findings of the current study will encourage future researchers to adopt more detailed measures of the psychological states of teachers who engage in emotional labor, and of the effects of teachers’ use of adaptive humor styles in school.

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increasing positive aspects of psychological well-being (Crawford & Caltabiano, 2011; Kuiper & McHale, 2009). Certainly, teachertraining programs should incorporate discussion of or training in those humor styles that are most appropriate to coping with emotions at work. Nevertheless, further research will be needed if we are to gain a rounded understanding of teachers’ emotions and uses of humor, as a means of improving the well-being of this critically important profession. Ethical approval All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Informed consent Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study. Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. Acknowledgements This work was financially supported by the grant MOST-1082634-F-002-022 from Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan, MOST AI Biomedical Research Center, and the “Institute for Research Excellence in Learning Sciences” and “Chinese Language and Technology Center” of National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) from The Featured Areas Research Center Program within the framework of the Higher Education Sprout Project by the Ministry of Education (MOE) in Taiwan. Appendix A. Supplementary data Supplementary data to this article can be found online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2019.102950.

8. Conclusion

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Humor has been commended as a means of restructuring situations to render them less stressful (Millicent, 2002), and the present study’s findings tend to confirm that its use as a coping mechanism by teachers is no exception to this general principle. This research has clarified our understanding of primary school teachers’ uses of humor styles, as well as such styles’ relationships with emotional labor. Notably, despite the fact that humor styles may not directly affect psychological well-being, the present study’s results have shown that they are connected to how people self-evaluate, which in turn can result in different degrees of psychological well-being. Given that understanding teachers’ emotions is crucial to fostering a positive and effective teaching and learning environment (Dyck & Holtzman, 2013; Ho, 2016), and that primary teaching is renowned for causing emotional exhaustion (Chang, 2009), it is hoped that the results of the present study will help raise teachers’ and teacher candidates’ awareness of the emotional demands of teaching. Additionally, studies of humorbased interventions have found them to be effective means of

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