Evidence of the indirect transmission of emotions from teachers to students in mathematics: The mediating role of instructional quality.

Recent studies have identified processes of classroom emotional transmission whereby the emotions of one classroom participant are induced in others, with potential for teachers' emotions to transmit to students. However, the field still lacks a comprehensive understanding of exactly how teachers' emotions might surface in the classroom via key mechanisms to impact students, and in which contexts these processes occur. We investigated the mediating role of fourth-grade teachers' (N = 33) observed instructional quality in the associations among teachers' self-reported anxiety for teaching mathematics and their students' (N = 443) self-reported mathematics emotions and engagement. Participants were recruited from 14 public elementary students in a single state in the Southwestern United States. Schools across this state varied considerably in schoolwide socioeconomic status and racial/ethnic makeup. Path models with cluster robust standard errors revealed an initial association between teachers' Time 1 (early fall) mathematics anxiety and their students' Time 3 (mid-winter) mathematics engagement, as well as two indirect effects of teachers' Time 2 (mid-fall) instructional quality on students' Time 3 outcomes: Instructional quality fully mediated the initial association between teachers' mathematics anxiety and students' mathematics engagement and played an indirect role in the association among teachers' mathematics anxiety and students' mathematics enjoyment. Effect sizes were small, ranging from .03 to .04. Results can inform efforts by education researchers and practitioners to incorporate foci on emotions in future research and systems of teacher and student support. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).