ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Cognition
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1609872
This article is part of the Research TopicCognitive Mechanisms Underpinning Pro-Social Behavior Across CulturesView all 9 articles
Cognitive Flexibility Mediates the Impact of Emotion Regulation Strategies on Negative Emotions in Preschool Teachers
Provisionally accepted
- 1Capital Normal University, Beijing, China
- 2Suzhou Education Quality Monitoring Centre, Suzhou, China
- 3Suzhou New District Experimental Primary School, Suzhou, China
- 4Beijing National Day Jin Yuan Kindergarten, Beijing, China
- 5Shanxi Vocational University of Engineering Science and Technology, Taiyuan, Shanxi Province, China
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
This study aimed to examine how cognitive flexibility mediates the associations between emotion regulation strategies and negative emotions among preschool teachers in China. A total of 392 inservice preschool teachers in Beijing were recruited through random sampling. Participants completed validated questionnaires assessing cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression (Emotion Regulation Questionnaire), anxiety and depression (SAS and SDS), and cognitive flexibility (Cognitive Flexibility Inventory). Structural equation modeling (SEM) and bootstrapping were used to test mediation models. The results revealed that cognitive reappraisal positively predicted cognitive flexibility, which in turn was associated with lower levels of both anxiety and depression. Conversely, expressive suppression negatively predicted cognitive flexibility, which indirectly contributed to increased negative emotions. However, the direct effects of expressive suppression on anxiety and depression were not statistically significant. These findings suggest that cognitive flexibility serves as a crucial psychological mechanism through which emotion regulation strategies impact mental health. This study advances current theoretical models by highlighting cognitive flexibility as a mediating factor in preschool teachers' emotional experiences.
Keywords: Emotion Regulation, cognitive flexibility, preschool teachers, Anxiety, Depression
Received: 11 Apr 2025; Accepted: 04 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Gu, Guo, Cui, YU, Chen, Chu and Zhou. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Changwei Gu, Capital Normal University, Beijing, China
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.