The relationships between Chinese teachers’ emotions, professional identity, and teaching for creativity: The mediating role of emotional intelligence

• In previous educational research, scholars have rarely utilized quantitative methods to examine the link between teachers' emotions and professional identity. To fill this knowledge gap, this study surveyed 15,675 junior high school teachers in China to develop a framework of structural relationships between teacher emotions, emotional intelligence, professional identity, and creative instructional use. • This study provides evidence that the relationship between teachers’ emotions and professional identity is mediated by emotional intelligence. For hypotheses 1 and 2, the results indicate that teachers’ positive emotions are positively related to emotional intelligence while negative emotions are negatively related to emotional intelligence. • The results of this study provide powerful evidence that teachers’ emotions are strongly linked to their professional identities. Emotional changes predicted the development of teachers’ identities, with positive emotions reinforcing these identities and negative emotions inhibiting them. • The study results suggest that teachers with high emotional intelligence not only have stronger professional identities but are also more likely to teach for creativity. • The results of the study provide some useful implications for enhancing teaching for creativity. First, the study's use of a large sample to confirm the importance of emotional intelligence in TfC indicates that schools should actively seek to build and maintain teaching environments that nurture creativity. In addition, teacher educators should focus their efforts on developing the emotional intelligence of student-teachers. This can be achieved by teaching emotional regulation and monitoring strategies to enhance the enthusiasm and creativity of trainees. Second, the results suggest that strengthening teachers’ professional identity is a prerequisite for more creative teaching. This can be achieved by boosting the public identity of teachers to enhance their sense of social satisfaction and honor in their profession, and by expanding the social, cultural, and institutional provision of resources for teaching. In terms of psychological factors, teachers’ emotions can be used to promote teaching for creativity by transforming public identity into self-identity, and by enhancing positive professional emotions via a good working atmosphere and interpersonal relationships.. This research investigated the complex relationship between teachers' emotions, emotional intelligence, professional identity, and teaching for creativity. The study used a web-based questionnaire to survey 15,675 secondary school teachers in China. Structural equation modeling indicated that teachers’ positive and negative emotions were positively and negatively related to their professional identities, respectively. The results of bootstrapping tests indicated that these relationships were mediated by teachers’ emotional intelligence. The study also found that teachers' emotional intelligence not only influenced their professional identity but also had a strong association with teaching for creativity, with professional identity partly mediating between the two. The article concludes with some implications in terms of regulating teachers’ emotions, improving professional identity, and enhancing teaching for creativity.