A well-slept teacher is a better teacher: A multi-respondent-experience-sampling study on sleep, stress, and emotional transmission in the classroom

Abstract

The present study examined the impact of sleep, stress, and negative activating emotions of high‐school teachers on their students’ affective experience, academic motivation, and in‐class satisfaction. It is hypothesized that teachers’ sleep quality and stress have a positive influence on their own nervousness and irritability. With reference to the emotional crossover theory, teachers’ nervousness and irritability are hypothesized to intensify students’ nervousness and irritability and subsequently dampen their academic motivation and in‐class satisfaction. Experience‐sampling data were collected from 17 teachers and 437 students from two local high schools in Hong Kong across a 10‐school‐day period. Multilevel path analysis results revealed that teachers’ stress was significantly associated with teachers’ nervousness and irritability. Teachers’ nervousness, rather than irritability, was subsequently associated with higher levels of nervousness and irritability among students, which, in turn, impaired their in‐class satisfaction. There was also a significant negative association between students’ irritability and their academic motivation. Results further showed that teachers’ stress arising from poor sleep quality was a significant antecedent of the teacher–student emotional crossover, subsequently affecting students’ academic motivation and in‐class satisfaction. The findings highlight the detrimental effects of teachers’ poor sleep and the resulting stress on students’ academic and affective experience. Discussion focuses on how to improve teachers’ sleep and manage their stress so as to enhance students’ in‐class emotions and academic motivation.