Teachers are subject to multiple stressors in their profession and often experience significant distress, which has been found to be linked with harsh and punitive behaviors. These behaviors have been found to influence students negatively, particularly those with vulnerable temperaments. Prior research has also found such negative teacher behavior to be associated with hierarchical social structures in classrooms. While many researchers have attributed this hierarchical structure to teacher modeling—normalizing negative displays of behavior or treating favored students preferentially—student personality may also be a factor. Students high in neuroticism have been found to be particularly vulnerable to stress and often withdrawn. Students high in extraversion, however, have been found to be sociable and to experience positive emotions more frequently. Some evidence suggests these students may also be more likely to form transitive friendships, in which person A is friends with person B, person B is friends with person C, and person A is also friends with C, creating more cohesive networks of friends. It is possible that one reason hierarchical classroom social structures emerge in classrooms in which teachers display negative behaviors is that students higher in extraversion support each other and help maintain each other’s positive emotions, while students higher in neuroticism are more likely to withdraw and experience more negative emotions. Students higher in extraversion may be more likely to occupy higher-status positions in the classroom social structure both because they have more frequent contact with one another, and because other students are more likely to hope to befriend those who are happier and have more friends. The current study will simulate fourth- and fifth-grade classrooms to investigate the relationship between teacher behavior, student personality, student emotions, and student social network structure. Results suggest that extraversion is associated with a greater likelihood of being embedded in transitive triads and greater popularity in the friendship social network. However, there is little evidence that neuroticism is associated with students’ position in the student social network or that teacher behavior is related to the structure of student social networks
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/47892 |
| Date | 02 January 2024 |
| Creators | DeYoung, Gerrit |
| Contributors | Howard, Kimberly A.S. |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ |
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