Emotional Intelligence Predicts Teaching Anxiety in Trainee Business Teachers, Study Finds

For most people, the first weeks of standing in front of a classroom are a crucible. The heart races before the bell, the lesson plan seems to dissolve the moment thirty pairs of eyes settle on you, and every awkward silence feels like a public verdict. For preservice teachers, the teaching practicum is precisely this crucible: the first sustained, high-stakes encounter with real students, real supervisors, and real consequences. A new study from the University of Cape Coast in Ghana now offers a quantitative account of what helps trainee teachers withstand that pressure, and the answer centers on a familiar but often underestimated psychological resource: emotional intelligence.

The research, published in the journal Discover Social Science and Health, was conducted by Gideon Tetteh Agormedah, Edmond Kwesi Agormedah, and Samuel Kwarteng of the Department of Business and Social Sciences Education. The team set out to determine whether emotional intelligence, often abbreviated as EI, predicts the level of teaching anxiety experienced by preservice business teachers during their practicum, and whether gender changes the strength of that relationship. Their findings point to a clear conclusion: emotional intelligence does influence teaching anxiety, and the effect holds regardless of whether the trainee is a man or a woman.

To understand why this matters, it helps to unpack the theoretical scaffolding the researchers chose. The study is grounded in the Transactional Model of Stress and Coping, a framework originally developed by psychologists Richard Lazarus and Susan Folkman in the 1980s. The model holds that stress is not simply a property of demanding situations, nor purely a feature of individual temperament. Instead, stress emerges from a transaction between the person and the environment: first, the individual appraises whether a situation threatens their well-being, and second, they appraise what resources they have to cope with it. A practicum classroom can therefore be read by one trainee as an intolerable threat and by another as a challenging but manageable task, depending on the cognitive and emotional resources each brings to the encounter.

Emotional intelligence fits into this model as exactly such a resource. Broadly, EI refers to the capacity to perceive, understand, regulate, and use emotions, both one’s own and those of other people. A trainee teacher high in EI can recognize the physical signs of their own rising panic, reframe a hostile-looking classroom as a normal feature of adolescent behavior, and modulate their emotional response before it spirals into full anxiety. A trainee low in EI, by contrast, may experience the same classroom events as an escalating series of threats with no obvious coping route. In transactional terms, EI shapes the secondary appraisal, the assessment of coping resources, and thereby determines how much stress the practicum ultimately produces.

The researchers tested this logic with an explanatory correlational cross-sectional design. Rather than sampling a subset of the population, they used a census approach, enrolling all 107 preservice business teachers available to the study, a group preparing to teach accounting and management subjects. Data were collected through a closed-ended structured questionnaire, a format that allows respondents to rate their emotional intelligence and their teaching anxiety on fixed scales and permits statistical comparison across the whole group. Because every member of the population was included, the study avoids the sampling bias that can creep in when only volunteers or easily reachable students participate.

The analysis proceeded in two statistical stages. First, the team used linear regression to test whether emotional intelligence scores predicted teaching anxiety levels during the practicum. Regression analysis estimates the direction and strength of the relationship between a predictor variable and an outcome, allowing researchers to ask whether higher EI is systematically associated with lower anxiety. Second, and more subtly, the researchers employed the PROCESS moderation procedure developed by statistician Andrew Hayes, a widely used tool for testing whether a third variable changes the strength or direction of a relationship between two others. Here, the third variable was gender. The question was not whether men and women differ in anxiety on average, but whether the protective effect of emotional intelligence operates differently for each gender.

The results answered both questions. Emotional intelligence did significantly influence the level of teaching anxiety reported by the preservice business teachers, consistent with the transactional prediction that stronger emotional coping resources should buffer the stress of the practicum. Yet the moderation analysis returned a null result: gender did not moderate the relationship. In other words, the anxiety-reducing benefit of emotional intelligence appears to operate similarly for male and female trainees. This finding is notable because much of the literature on teaching anxiety has documented gender differences in self-reported anxiety, and one might have expected the coping mechanism to work differently across genders. The Cape Coast data suggest that the underlying psychological machinery is shared.

There are technical caveats worth keeping in view. A cross-sectional design captures a single moment in time, so it can establish that EI and anxiety are related as theory predicts, but it cannot prove that emotional intelligence causes lower anxiety; it is at least conceivable that less anxious trainees find it easier to report high emotional competence. The modest sample of 107 participants, while a complete census of its population, is small by the standards of moderation analysis, and null moderation findings can sometimes reflect limited statistical power rather than a true absence of effect. Self-report questionnaires, meanwhile, depend on respondents’ willingness and ability to describe their own emotional lives accurately. None of these limitations undermines the study’s core contribution, but they mark the boundaries within which its conclusions should be read.

The practical implications, however, reach well beyond the statistical tables. Teacher education programs in many countries devote extensive time to subject-matter knowledge and pedagogical technique, while treating the emotional demands of teaching as something trainees will simply absorb through experience. The Ghanaian researchers argue that this passive approach should change. Their central recommendation is that stakeholders in teacher education be intentional about incorporating structured emotional intelligence development into the preparation of future business teachers, so that trainees enter the practicum equipped to manage the emotional pressures it generates. Structured EI development can take many forms, from explicit instruction in emotion recognition and regulation to supervised reflection on stressful classroom episodes, role-play exercises, and peer-support structures that normalize anxiety rather than stigmatize it.

The focus on business teachers is itself significant. Preservice accounting and management teachers occupy a distinctive niche: they must translate technical, often abstract content into engaging lessons while managing classrooms that may regard their subject as dry or intimidating. That combination of content-delivery pressure and classroom-management demand makes the practicum an especially potent stressor for this group, and it makes the finding that EI buffers their anxiety particularly actionable. If emotional competence can be built before trainees ever face their first class, the practicum could shift from a trial by fire into a genuinely formative experience.

More broadly, the study adds to a growing body of evidence that the emotional dimension of teaching is not a soft afterthought but a core professional competency. The Transactional Model of Stress and Coping reminds us that the same classroom can be experienced as threat or challenge depending on the appraisals a teacher brings to it, and emotional intelligence is one of the few trainable resources that shapes those appraisals directly. The Cape Coast team’s finding that this resource works across genders simplifies the intervention problem: teacher educators do not need gender-specific emotional training tracks, only well-designed programs that raise EI for everyone. As education systems worldwide grapple with teacher attrition and burnout, evidence that a trainable psychological skill can reduce the anxiety of the very first teaching experience offers a promising, and refreshingly practical, point of intervention. The study, published open access with a permanent DOI, invites teacher educators everywhere to ask whether their programs are teaching the emotional curriculum as seriously as the academic one.

Subject of Research: The relationship between emotional intelligence and teaching practicum anxiety among preservice business teachers

Article Title: Emotional intelligence and teaching practicum anxiety in preservice business teachers across gender differences

Article References: Agormedah, G. T., Agormedah, E. K., & Kwarteng, S. (2026). Emotional intelligence and teaching practicum anxiety in preservice business teachers across gender differences. Discover Social Science and Health. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44155-026-00472-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44155-026-00472-w

Keywords: emotional intelligence, teaching anxiety, teaching practicum, preservice teachers, business education, teacher education, stress and coping, Transactional Model of Stress and Coping, gender differences, Ghana, moderation analysis, teacher training