Abstract

The acquisition of emotional skills in pre-service teacher training is important as they are expected and formally assessed throughout their university curriculum in education. Drawing on Mikolajczak et al.’s (2020) model of emotional competence and Gross and John’s (2003) model of emotional regulation, we explored the quality of students’ relationships with students and school team members during their placement, depending on whether or not they presented alexithymic difficulties. Alexithymia is a personality trait characterized by difficulties in identifying, analyzing, and verbalizing emotions (Bagby et al., 2020). The sample included 60 fourth-year students (63% female) attending a program at a Canadian university located in Alberta. Data were collected using a one-time correlational design through self-reported questionnaires. The results indicate that student trainees with emotional skill deficits manifested as alexithymia use more expressive suppression at the expense of cognitive reappraisal to regulate their emotions as compared to their non-alexithymic peers who do not have this type of deficiency. The results also suggest that alexithymic student trainees with deficient emotional skills develop lower quality relationships with students and school team stakeholders when compared to those without alexithymia, who have better emotional skills. This study highlights the importance of implementing measures in the first year of initial teacher training that will enable future teachers to develop their emotional competencies in order to reach the level of competence expected for this type of profession.