The essential role of teacher well-being in education has been increasingly recognized across the last years (McCallum et al., 2017). Based on the view that well-being of teachers is not only the absence of negative emotions and stress but also the presence of positive emotions and personal and professional flourishing (Huppert, 2009; Kern et al., 2014), it has been shown that teacher well-being has a positive impact on students’ learning and development. For instance, teacher well-being has been shown to be associated with higher academic gains of students (Caprara et al., 2003; Briner and Dewberry, 2007; Duckworth et al., 2009), to be an important precondition for the improvement of the well-being of students (Coleman, 2009; McCallum and Price, 2010; Sisask et al., 2014), the quality of teaching (for a review, see Hascher and Waber, 2021), and to enhance the professional motivation of teachers (McCallum, 2020). Experiencing well-being is also crucial for teachers themselves. Beyond the fact that well-being is a desirable good in itself, well-being is a precondition for teachers to experience teaching as a rewarding profession involving meaningful and important work, which prevents for the danger of loss to the profession (Pillay et al., 2005).

Given the important role of teacher well-being in education, recent studies have tried to identify factors that influence the well-being of teachers both at the level of general school conditions, such as job crafting (Dreer, 2022) and trust in colleagues (Huang et al., 2019), and the level of teacher-student interactions, such as student behavior (Aloe et al., 2014; Aldrup et al., 2018), experienced emotions when working with students (Spilt et al., 2011), or teacher goals (Rüprich and Urhahne, 2015), for reviews see (Acton and Glasgow, 2015; McCallum et al., 2017).

However, there is a basic principle of psychological functioning that may play an important role regarding the influence of many factors but has been neglected in the research on teacher well-being. Across a broad range of psychological phenomena, it has been found that the psychological effects of bad events (e.g., failures, being rejected by others, and receiving criticism) outweigh those of good events (e.g., success, being valued by others, and receiving praise), a principle that has been summarized in the often-cited quotation “bad is stronger than good” (Baumeister et al., 2001, p 323; for reviews, see Baumeister et al., 2001, Vaish et al., 2008).

This psychological principle may also play an important role for the experienced well-being of teachers. In their daily work, teachers are confronted with both good and bad events, experiencing teaching sometimes as influential, meaningful, and emotionally rewarding but sometimes also as uninfluential, meaningless, and emotionally stressful. However, despite of having both good and bad teaching experiences, the experienced well-being may be negatively biased due to the principle that bad experiences are given more weight than good experiences. For instance, although a teacher may actually successfully reach her/his educational goals for a large number of students and experience positive emotions when doing so, her/his well-being may nevertheless be low as soon as there are a few students for whom educational goals are difficult to reach and experienced emotions are negative.

The principle that bad is stronger than good has already been proven in a variety of fields, such as interpersonal interaction (Gottman, 1994), decision making (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979), learning (Miller, 1944), and teacher-student feedback (Coleman et al., 1987). However, while it has been shown that teachers´ goals and emotions when interacting with students do generally play a role for teacher well-being (e.g., Rüprich and Urhahne, 2015; Dreer, 2021), the question of whether teachers´ goals and emotions for students showing undesirable behaviors (“bad”) count more for teacher well-being than teachers´ goals and emotions for students showing desirable behaviors (“good”) has largely been neglected in the field of teacher research.

The aim of the present study was to examine whether the principle of bad is stronger than good plays a role in the experienced well-being of teachers. To examine this question, we measured the goals and experienced emotions of teachers for students showing desirable behaviors (i.e., students who pay attention in class, do their work on time, are well organized, and have a positive attitude to learning) and students showing undesirable behaviors (i.e., students who disrupt the class, do not finish their work, are unorganized, and have a negative attitude to learning), and determined the contributions of teachers’ goals and emotions for students showing desirable vs. undesirable behaviors to the teachers’ well-being.

Following previous operationalizations of well-being as a multifaceted construct encompassing elements of different psychological processes (Keyes, 2002; Seligman, 2012), teacher well-being was measured in terms of experienced positive and negative emotions (i.e., affective well-being), satisfaction with life (i.e., evaluative well-being; Diener et al., 1999), personal flourishing (i.e., psychological well-being; Ryff and Keys, 1995), and occupational functioning (i.e., occupational well-being; Van Horn et al., 2004). Whereas the experienced emotions of teachers are one of the main factors contributing to their affective well-being, the goals of teachers are one of the main factors determining their teaching-related evaluative, psychological, and occupational well-being. In fact, measuring only affective well-being without taking into account goal-related well-being may provide an incomplete picture of teacher well-being because a teacher may experience a high degree of affective well-being despite having dysfunctional goals and thus suboptimal psychological and occupational well-being.

Table 1 shows the means and SDs for the measured variables as well as the correlations between all variables. Teacher goals for students showing desirable and undesirable behaviors did not differ, t(249) = 0.4, p = 0.655, d = 0.03. Experienced emotions were more negative for students undesirable behaviors than for students showing desirable behaviors, t(249) = 31.5, p < 0.001, d = 1.99, and more arousing for students showing desirable behaviors than for students showing undesirable behaviors t(249) = 2.6, p = 0.010, d = 0.16.

To examine the effects of teacher goals and emotions on teacher well-being, multiple regression analyses were conducted with affective (positive and negative affect), evaluative, psychological, and occupational well-being as the dependent variables and (1) teacher goals for students showing desirable and undesirable behaviors as independent variables, and (2) teacher emotions (valence and arousal) for students showing desirable and undesirable behaviors as independent variables. Results are shown in Table 2 (effect of teacher goals) and Table 3 (effect of teacher emotions). The results depicted in Tables 2, 3 show, as illustrated in Figure 2 (effect of teacher goals) and Figure 3 (effect of teacher emotions), that affective, psychological, and occupational well-being depended on the height of teachers’ goals and experienced emotions for students showing undesirable behaviors. Descriptively, the effect was stronger for teacher goals than for teacher emotions. By contrast, neither teachers’ goals nor experienced emotions for students showing desirable behaviors did influence any of the well-being measurements.

Numerous findings have shown that the psychological impact of bad events is stronger than the psychological impact of good events. The present findings indicate that this holds also true for the well-being of teachers. Teachers’ affective, occupational, and psychological well-being were relatively strongly related to their goals and experienced emotions for students showing undesirable behaviors: the higher the goals and the more positive the experienced emotions, the higher the reported well-being. By contrast, the goals and experienced emotions for students showing desirable behaviors were unrelated to the teachers’ well-being.

The finding that teachers’ goals and emotions for students showing undesirable behaviors have a higher impact on teacher well-being than teachers’ goals and emotions for students showing desirable behaviors is in line with numerous findings demonstrating the principle of “bad is stronger than good” in a variety of psychological domains (Baumeister et al., 2001). The common explanation is that a higher psychological impact of bad events compared to good events is adaptive because the costs of failure of adequate responding to bad events can be much higher than the costs of failure of adequate responding to good events (Baumeister et al., 2001). For instance, while a failure to respond adequately to a snake can have fatal consequences, a failure to respond adequately to a pleasant object can possibly be corrected at the next attempt. Consistent with such a hypothesis, numerous studies have shown that bad objects are more efficiently and preferably processed (Ohman et al., 2001; Dijksterhuis and Aarts, 2003; Nasrallah et al., 2009; Kuhbandner et al., 2011).

In fact, a similar mechanism may explain the present finding that teachers’ goals and emotions for students showing undesirable behaviors have a higher impact on their well-being than teachers’ goals and emotions for students showing desirable behaviors. When judging their well-being, teachers may more strongly focus on their experiences with students showing undesirable behaviors so that their experienced well-being may be mainly determined by the experiences they make with these students. Experiencing more positive emotions when interacting with students showing undesirable behaviors and being able to pursue higher goals for these students will thus result in higher experienced well-being. Due to the focus on students showing undesirable behaviors, experiences with students showing desirable behaviors may contribute less to one’s experienced well-being, and even if a teacher experiences positive emotions and pursues high goals when interacting with students showing desirable behaviors, this may not matter when there are students showing undesirable behaviors who elicit negative emotions and for whom no high goals are pursued. That is, even if a teacher actually successfully achieves high goals for a large number of students and experiences positive emotions when doing so, the well-being of a teacher can still be low if there are some students for whom educational goals are difficult to achieve.

From an applied perspective, the present finding opens up new ways to increase the well-being of teachers. On the one hand, well-being may be increased by giving more weight to goals and emotions for students showing desirable behaviors when judging ones’ well-being. On the other hand, well-being may be increased by helping teachers to establish high goals and experience more positive emotions when interacting with students showing undesirable behaviors. To achieve the latter, it is important to make teachers aware that it is important to pursue high goals not only for students showing desirable behaviors but also for students showing undesirable behaviors, and to help them to develop skills to reach high goals for students showing undesirable behaviors. Furthermore, from a motivational perspective, it could be essential to supplement the most frequently mentioned motive for teaching “Because I like to work with children and adolescents” (Rothland, 2011) by the phrase “both with students showing desirable behaviors and with students showing undesirable behaviors.”

At first glance, the results of the present study seem to suggest that the impact of teacher goals on teacher well-being is stronger than the impact of teacher emotions. In fact, the effect of teacher emotions was small, and when correcting for multiple testing, the effect of teacher emotions for students showing undesirable behaviors on some of the well-being measures no longer reached conventional levels of significance. However, it is important to note that, although both goals and emotions were measured with reference to the same sets of specific pictures of students, goals and emotions were measured in different ways. Teacher goals were measured using a questionnaire which assesses one’s general goals for students showing desirable and undesirable behaviors (e.g., “In my job as a teacher, I strive to hold interesting lessons for this type of students”). By contrast, teacher emotions were assessed by measuring the participants’ experienced emotions for the specific set of students shown on the pictures. That is, whereas goals were measured in a more trait-like manner, emotions were measured in a more state-like manner. Since state measures are more prone to situational effect which may introduce stronger situation-specific variance, the observed stronger effects of goals compared to experienced emotions may reflect the fact that goals were measured more trait-like and emotions measured more state-like.

Another reason for the observed stronger effects of goals compared to experienced emotions may be that experienced emotions were measured using pictures of students showing desirable or undesirable behaviors. Emotional experiences may be stronger when elicited in real-life classroom situations and may thus play a larger role for teacher well-being as suggested by the measured emotional responses to pictures of classroom situations. Furthermore, another potential limitation of the present study is that the data were collected in an online environment which allows only limited control. Accordingly, further examining the relationship between the goals and emotions of teachers and their well-being in real-life situations may be an interesting avenue for future research.

There is a relatively large body of research indicating that goals (i.e., explicit motives) and emotions (i.e., implicit motives) are often largely unrelated (for a meta-analysis, see Köllner and Schultheiss, 2014). This is also supported by the present study where the height of goals and the valence of experienced emotions were uncorrelated for students showing desirable behaviors and only slightly correlated for students showing undesirable behaviors. Regarding the effects on well-being, there is evidence that a congruency between implicit and explicit motives is associated with elevated well-being (for a review, see Thrash et al., 2012). Accordingly, examining whether this may also be true for the relationship between teachers’ goals and emotions for students and their experienced well-being is an interesting research question. However, examining this question with the present data is problematic since, as described above, goals were measured in a more trait-like manner, whereas emotions were measured in a more state-like manner. Accordingly, it is difficult to draw valid conclusions about the interplay of goals and emotions based on the present data. Examining this issue is an interesting avenue for future research.

The present findings indicate that teachers’ goals and experienced emotions for students showing undesirable behaviors contribute more to their well-being than teachers’ goals and emotions for students showing desirable behaviors. An open question is, however, which factors may explain why teachers differ in the height of their goals for students showing undesirable behaviors. One possibility is that teachers with higher goals and more positive emotions for students showing undesirable behaviors have a higher ability to regulate the problematic behavior of these students. Another possibility is that teachers with higher goals and more positive emotions for students showing undesirable behaviors had less contact so far with students showing highly undesirable behaviors. In fact, such factors may contribute to the observed finding that teacher with higher goals and more positive emotions for students showing undesirable behaviors show higher well-being. Although examining this issue is an important avenue of future research, this does not concern the main finding of the present study that teachers’ goals and experienced emotions for students showing undesirable behaviors contribute more to their well-being than teachers’ goals and emotions for students showing desirable behaviors.

In conclusion, the present findings indicate that the psychological principle of “bad is stronger than good” holds also for the influence of teachers’ goals and emotions on their well-being. Whereas teachers’ goals and emotions for students showing undesirable behaviors had a relatively strong impact, their well-being was entirely independent of their goals and emotions for students showing desirable behaviors. From an applied perspective, it may thus be helpful to make teachers aware of the psychological principle of “bad is stronger than good,” and to help them to realize that the setting of high goals for students showing undesirable behaviors is an important ingredient for their teacher well-being.

The datasets presented in this study can be found in online repositories. The names of the repository/repositories and accession number(s) can be found at: https://osf.io/jbsqf/.

Ethical review and approval was not required for the study on human participants in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. The patients/participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.

MF and CK developed the research idea and drafted the manuscript. MF designed the study. MF, CK, and SH analyzed the data. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

The project which this article is part of is supported by the federal and state governments as part of the joint “Qualitätsoffensive Lehrerbildung” (Teacher Education Quality Offensive), which is funded from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research under the grant number 01JA1812. The authors are responsible for the content of this publication.

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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