〔Problem and Purpose] In recent years, attempts to cultivate children's social-emotional competence, such as SEL, have been attracting attention in educational settings. In this study, we focused on the individual differences in the emotional aspects of educators who nurture children's social-emotional competence, such as their evaluation of emotions and empathy, and examined the relationship between these differences and the way they perceive emotional support for children.
〔Methods〕 A questionnaire survey was administered to undergraduate students in teacher training colleges (133 valid responses: 42 males and 91 females) to measure three factors: evaluation of emotion, multidimensional empathy, and perception of emotional support.
〔Results〕 An analysis of variance was conducted using cluster analysis, with the evaluation of emotion and empathy as independent variables, and the perception of emotional support as the dependent variable. The results revealed that the positive emotion evaluation group placed more importance on supporting the child's independent resolution than the negative emotion evaluation group, and that the group with high overall empathy placed more importance on supporting the child's independent resolution than the self-oriented group.
〔Discussion〕 These results suggest that evaluating emotions positively as necessary and meaningful, rather than negatively, and having diverse and rich empathic reactions, rather than feeling only self-protective reactions to others' emotions, can lead to emotional support that places more importance on children's independent resolution. The results of this study suggest that the following is true. Therefore, we discussed the significance of learning to know and positively evaluate the meaning and function of emotions, to view empathy in multiple dimensions, and to learn that a variety of empathic reactions have meaning, starting at the teacher training stage.
