The Role of Emotional and Meta-Emotional Intelligence as Teachers’ Personal Resources for Preventing Burnout and Promoting Health, Well-Being, and Self-Efficacy

Teaching is an emotionally demanding profession that requires balancing instructional responsibilities with social and psychological challenges. Teachers must navigate high workloads, student interactions, and institutional pressures, all of which contribute to stress, burnout, and decreased well-being. Emotional intelligence (EI) has been widely studied as a key resource in managing these challenges, however, the existence of competing conceptualizations and measurement methods often led to inconsistent findings across studies, making it difficult to synthesize the current state of knowledge in this field. To address these limitations, meta-emotional intelligence (MEI) has recently emerged as a novel construct that integrates emotional abilities with meta-emotional dimensions. It reflects the extent to which individuals align their self-perceptions and self-evaluations with their actual emotional abilities. A precise and realistic understanding of one's emotional abilities enables individuals to effectively interpret situations, regulate their emotions, and navigate social interactions. This doctoral thesis explores the role of EI and MEI as protective factors in teachers’ occupational well-being across three empirical studies. The first study investigates the differential impact of self-reported and performance-based EI on burnout and self-efficacy, revealing that self-reported EI significant predict these variables compared to performance-based EI. The second study introduces MEI, examining how discrepancies between self-perceived and actual emotional abilities relate to burnout and health outcomes. Findings indicate that lower MEI is associated with higher emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and poorer psychological and physical health. The third study evaluates the effectiveness of the Meta-Emotions Program, a training intervention designed to enhance EI and MEI among teachers. While the intervention did not significantly improve EI abilities, it led to increases in MEI, particularly in meta-emotional beliefs and self-evaluations, reducing the tendency to underestimate emotional competencies. Overall, this research underscores the critical role of EI and MEI in mitigating burnout, improving self-efficacy, and promoting teacher health. The findings highlight the greater plasticity of MEI compared to EI, while also emphasizing the need for long-term, structured, and theory-driven EI trainings in teacher education to foster sustainable improvements in emotional abilities.