Emotional competence in pre-service support teacher education: towards digital affective literacy

Abstract

Schools increasingly require teachers to combine inclusive pedagogical competence with the capacity to manage emotionally demanding and digitally mediated interactions. This exploratory-descriptive study examines emotional competence as a component of inclusive professionalism among 619 Italian pre-service and in-service support teachers. Participants completed self-report measures of perceived stress, teacher self-efficacy, emotional awareness and regulation, cognitive reappraisal, expressive suppression, motivation, and professional emotional competencies related to stress management, goal planning, social skills and contextual understanding. Descriptive statistics, reliability analyses, exploratory factor analyses, Pearson correlations and group comparisons were conducted. All measures showed acceptable to excellent internal consistency (Cronbach’s α = .73–.97). Perceived stress was negatively associated with stress-management competence (r = −.45), emotional awareness and regulation (r = −.29), and cognitive reappraisal (r = −.20). Cognitive reappraisal was positively related to emotional awareness (r = .48), whereas expressive suppression showed a weak positive association with stress and a negative association with social skills. No significant differences in perceived stress emerged across school levels or employment status. The findings support the role of emotional competence as a professional resource and are discussed through the concept of Digital Affective Literacy: the capacity to recognize, interpret and regulate affective and relational processes in hybrid and AI-mediated educational environments. The construct is proposed as a formative framework rather than as a variable directly measured in the study.