News release

From: American Psychological Association

Teachers' emotions can make or break student learning

Joy sparks better learning, while anger shuts students down, study says

Teachers’ emotions in the classroom play a critical role in how students learn, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.

When teachers experience enjoyment, they deliver higher-quality instruction that boosts students’ confidence in their abilities, interest and academic performance, while teacher anger is linked to poorer teaching and worse student outcomes.

“We decided to conduct this research because teaching is not only an intellectual activity but also an emotional one,” said lead author Marina Elena Pfeifer, PhD, of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. “We wanted to understand this full chain of events connecting how a teacher feels to how a student performs.”

The study, published in the Journal of Educational Psychology, analyzed data from 679 mathematics teachers and more than 17,500 students across eight countries: Chile, China, Colombia, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Spain and the United Kingdom. During the study, students studied the same math lesson, which allowed researchers to fairly compare classrooms across different countries.

Teachers reported their levels of enjoyment and anger, while students rated their teachers’ teaching quality, reported their own confidence and interest in the subject and completed a performance test. Researchers focused on three key aspects of teaching quality: classroom management, supportive teacher-student relationships and cognitive activation, which involves encouraging students to think critically.

“We hypothesized that a teacher’s emotions act as a domino effect in the classroom, linking to student outcomes indirectly through the quality of their instruction,” Pfeifer said.

The findings supported that hypothesis. Teachers who reported greater enjoyment were more likely to manage classrooms effectively, build supportive relationships with students and use cognitively engaging teaching strategies. These teaching practices, in turn, were associated with higher student confidence in their abilities, greater interest in learning and improved test performance. In contrast, teachers who reported more anger showed lower levels of teaching quality across all three areas and were associated with less favorable student outcomes.

“In one sense, the findings were not entirely surprising because theory and previous smaller-scale studies had suggested that teacher emotions matter for teaching and learning,” Pfeifer said. “What was especially striking, however, was that these findings could now be shown on a large scale, with a highly culturally diverse teacher sample.”

The researchers also identified a counterintuitive finding: More supportive teacher-student relationships were sometimes linked to lower student performance. Pfeifer suggested this may reflect teachers providing more emotional support when students are struggling academically.

“The most fascinating part for me was the cross-cultural similarity of our findings,” Pfeifer said. “Despite considerable cultural, economic and linguistic differences, the mechanisms by which a teacher’s emotions shape teaching quality and student outcomes remained remarkably similar across the globe.”

The findings highlight the importance of supporting teachers’ emotional well-being as part of improving education systems.

“Our study shows that a teacher’s emotions are not merely a byproduct of the educational process, but an active contributor to it,” Pfeifer said. “The major real-world implication is that supporting a teacher’s emotional well-being is not just a ‘nice-to-have’—it is critical to student success.”

The researchers suggest that schools and policymakers should prioritize reducing teacher stress and providing tools such as mindfulness-based interventions to help educators regulate their emotions.

“Our findings suggest that teachers can easily get caught in powerful, self-feeding emotional-behavioral cycles,” Pfeifer said. “An angry teacher might struggle to manage the class effectively, leading to poor student performance, which in turn makes the teacher feel even more frustrated and unsuccessful—a vicious cycle. Conversely, a joyful teacher creates a virtuous cycle in which effective teaching leads to student success, which makes the teacher even happier and prouder of their work.”