An associative model of Chinese university teachers' personality traits and students' classroom engagement from the teacher's perspective: the mediating role of emotional regulation.

Authors

Baohong Lu, Wenzhi Hou, Jinliang Sun, Lijun Wang

Published in

Frontiers in psychology. Volume 17. Pages 1823628. Epub Jun 09, 2026.

Abstract

Teachers' personality traits and emotional regulation are pivotal in shaping the instructional climate, yet the specific mechanisms through which these factors are collectively associated with student engagement from the teacher's perspective remain under-explored, particularly within a unified structural framework.
This study aimed to construct and validate a structural associative model to explore the association of Chinese university teachers' Big Five personality traits with students' classroom engagement.
A convenience sample of 154 university teachers from diverse regions and academic disciplines across China completed the NEO-PI-R (Chinese version), the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire, and an adapted Classroom Engagement Scale. A second-order structural equation model (SEM) with bootstrapping (5,000 resamples) was conducted to test the hypothesized mediation pathways.
The second-order SEM exhibited an excellent fit to the data (χ²/df = 1.636, CFI = 0.940, TLI = 0.930, RMSEA = 0.064). Findings revealed that teacher personality, as a holistic construct, was significantly and positively associated with students' classroom engagemen (β = 0.636, p < 0.001). Notably, the Openness dimension showed a robust factor loading (β = 0.919), affirming the theoretical integrity of the model. Furthermore, emotional regulation significantly mediated the link between personality traits and engagement (indirect effect = 0.255, p < 0.001), accounting for 32.1% of the total effect.
The results underscore that while teachers' stable dispositions provide a foundation for student involvement, adaptive emotional regulation-specifically cognitive reappraisal-may serve as a bridge linking these traits to engagement outcomes. This study provides empirical evidence for integrating emotion-management training into professional development to optimize teacher-student interactions in higher education.

PMID:
42344983
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 25 Jun 2026.

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