MANAGING EMOTIONS THROUGH SELF-TALK: MODERATING EFFECT OF DEMOGRAPHICS

Abstract

Regulating emotions has always been of great concern as it impacts mind and body of an individual tremendously. The concern over regulating emotions has become all the more important in the covid pandemic scenario. Current study attempts to address this issue by exploring the effect of self-talk on regulation of emotions among primary school teachers of North India. A sample of 529 primary school teachers represented the study and the study aims at determining the factors of self-talk and confirming them. Exploratory factor analysis run through SPSS 21 software contributed in determining the factors of self-talk and results of confirmatory factor analysis conducted through PLS adequately surpassed the measurement model criterion for self-talk and emotional regulation (ER) at higher order. Further, in order to understand the underlying relationship between self-talk and emotional regulation, structural model analysis was conducted through PLS-bootstrapping, which disclosed that self-talk has a significant positive effect in regulation of emotions with an R-square value of 44.2 per cent and a high effect size of 79.4 per cent. While the existence of moderation effect of selected demographics was checked through PLS-MGA after confirming the invariance among groups through PLS-MICOM. Its result revealed that self-talk is a significant tool in regulating emotions for all teachers irrespective of demographic frontier. Hence, the present study guide particularly teachers and people in general to use self-talk as a tool to overcome with their emotional turbulence and findings also provide direction to counsellor and psychologists to guide people in rerouting their emotions in a right direction.