| Abstract: | This research examined whether prospective teachers’ emotion regulation styles, dispositional empathy, and conceptions of competent student emotion and behavior were predictive of their attitudes about bullying and proposed responses to peer conflict. Overall, participants perceived physical bullying as more serious than verbal and relational bullying. Prospective teachers also expressed higher levels of sympathy for victims and a greater likelihood of intervention in response to physical bullying. Regression analyses demonstrated that valuing emotional competence and the role of teachers in supporting its development were meaningfully associated with expressed support for victims and with proposed responses to the perpetrators of this type of classroom aggression. Interestingly, those respondents who reported higher levels of situationally specific sympathy for victims (and not dispositional empathy) also reported that they would be more likely than their counterparts to intervene on their behalf. The emotional reactivity component of dispositional empathy was, however, positively associated with regulated responses to peer conflict involving a difficult child. The emotion regulation variables, although associated with the outcome measures in correlational analyses, were not unique predictors of prospective teachers’ bullying attitudes. |
