Enhancing coping self-efficacy and Well-being: A multi-context study of an emotion regulation program for preservice teachers

Globally, pre-service and early career teachers report high levels of stress and emotion regulation difficulties, leading to high rates of burnout and attrition in the first five years of the profession. Therefore, there is an urgent need for the development and evaluation of programming to support pre-service teachers’ emotion regulation and stress management and examine the relevance of the program across cultural contexts. The present study investigated the effectiveness of a program for preservice teachers’ emotion regulation and stress management in Montreal-Canada and Hong Kong-China. Participants were 378 preservice teachers, with 158 from Hong Kong (81.6% women; program group: n = 70) and 220 from Canada (85.9% women; program group: n = 157). Data were collected at three points: before the program, immediately after the program, and two to four weeks after the program. The findings from the latent growth models suggested that both Canadian and Hong Kong program groups displayed significant improvements in coping self-efficacy after participating in the program whereas no changes were detected for well-being. Moreover, the Canadian sample demonstrated significantly higher baseline coping self-efficacy compared to the Hong Kong Chinese sample. Gender and age, considered as covariates in the study, did not yield any significant findings. The study provides valuable insights into the potential benefits of emotion regulation programming for preservice teachers’ coping abilities and emphasizes that such benefits can be comparable across contexts. Copyright © 2025 The Author(s).