Since modern teaching is an emotional rollercoaster, maintaining emotional, and therefore, social comfort in a school environment is a prerequisite for all educators when preparing and cooperating with teachers. Due to the nature of teaching, certain emotions are clearly more dominant, and the teacher’s mental state is significantly affected by them. The current study, based on a mixedmethod approach, aimed to discover the types of emotions that accompany early career teachers at school. Furthermore, it landscapes a metaphorical map of the teacher’s emotional development according to the teachers’ attitude protocol (TAP), and the results imply that every stage brings distinct emotions affecting the teacher’s mental state, which might be especially useful when mentoring young teachers.

Alexithymia is understood as a multidimensional personality trait associated with deficits in emotional awareness. Previous research has indicated that dimensions of alexithymia are related to impaired emotional self-regulation. This study intended to verify whether alexithymia dimensions are linked to interpersonal emotion regulation (IER). IER is conceptualized as extrinsic (regulation of other peoples’ emotions) and intrinsic (regulation of one’s own emotions through social interaction). Two hundred seventy-two students of several bachelor’s and master’s programs at the University of Economics and Human Sciences in Warsaw, Poland, took part in the study and completed the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20) and two measures of IER: Managing the Emotions of Others Scale (MEOS) and The Interpersonal Emotional Regulation Questionnaire (IERQ). All alexithymia dimensions and their overall level were positively correlated with two nonprosocial extrinsic IER strategies – poor skills and emotion concealing. The overall severity of alexithymia and its two dimensions (externally oriented style of thinking and difficulty describing feelings) were negatively correlated with the extrinsic IER strategy of affect enhancement. The severity of the overall level of alexithymia and its dimensions were negatively related to the use of adaptive strategies to regulate one's own emotions during live social interaction. In addition, the study showed that all three alexithymia factors play a role as predictors of extrinsic and intrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation strategies. This study presents a picture of how the severity of alexithymia is linked to the management of other people's emotions and the regulation of one's own emotions in social situations.

The current study pioneers the exploration of the dynamic modulation of children's brain activities, specifically alpha power, in response to varying degrees of social engagement. Real-time electroencephalography (EEG) monitoring was employed on 97 children to investigate alpha power during two distinct social activities: sand-playing and story-listening, under three conditions: the presence of a parent, a stranger, or being alone. It is hypothesized a decrease in children's alpha power with the presence of others and that this alpha suppression effect would be stronger at higher levels of social engagement. Findings indicated a significant modulation of alpha power in response to social presence during story-listening, evidenced by a decrease in alpha amplitude when a parent or stranger is present compared to being alone. In contrast, during sand-playing activities, no significant differences were observed, suggesting that the social modulation of alpha power is context-dependent and relates to attentional engagement with the social stimulus. These results contribute to the understanding of the neural basis of social cognition in children, demonstrating that social presence and the level of attentional