Toward Empirical Evidence for Teachers’ Mental Representations of Dyadic Relationships With Students: Two Priming Experiments

The attachment-based perspective on teacher-student relationships assumes that teachers internalize experiences with specific students into mental representations of dyadic relationships. Once activated, mental representations are believed to influence teachers’ affective and cognitive social information processing. Two priming experiments with 57 elementary school teachers were conducted to test these assumptions. To activate teachers’ mental representations of dyadic relationships, teachers were primed with photographs of students with whom they have a positive and negative relationship (two experimental conditions) as well as with photographs of students with whom they have a distant relationship and unknown students (two control conditions). Teachers’ responses in two different experiments –an emotion categorization task and a vignette task –were analyzed to measure differences between conditions. Mixed evidence was found for the idea that teachers’ mental representations of dyadic relationships impact their affective and cognitive information processing.