Music Education, Classroom Wellbeing, and Student Engagement: Music Teachers' Emotion Regulation, Psychological Capital, and Innovative Teaching Behavior

Music classrooms pose unique emotional and pedagogical challenges that shape both classroom wellbeing and student engagement. Educators are required not only to manage classroom emotions effectively, but also to foster creative, interactive, and emotionally supportive learning experiences. Nevertheless, the psychological and behavioral pathways linking music teachers’ emotion regulation strategies with teacher-perceived student engagement remain insufficiently examined. A cross-sectional quantitative survey was administered to 410 primary and secondary school music teachers in China. Two core emotion regulation strategies, namely cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression, were measured. Validated multi-item scales were adapted to assess psychological capital, innovative teaching behavior, and teacher-perceived student engagement. Confirmatory factor analysis, structural equation modeling, and bias-corrected bootstrap mediation analysis were employed to test the hypothesized associational model. The results revealed that cognitive reappraisal was positively linked to psychological capital, which in turn showed positive associations with innovative teaching behavior and teacher-perceived student engagement. Innovative teaching behavior was also positively correlated with teacher-perceived student engagement. A significant sequential indirect effect from cognitive reappraisal to teacher-perceived student engagement was identified through the chain mediation of psychological capital and innovative teaching behavior. By contrast, expressive suppression showed no direct relationships with innovative teaching behavior or teacher-perceived student engagement, although weak negative indirect effects were detected through psychological capital. These findings indicate that adaptive emotion regulation may be linked to teacher-perceived student engagement through psychological and behavioral pathways. Accordingly, nurturing music teachers’ psychological capital and encouraging innovative teaching practices may help build more engaging and wellbeing-supportive music classroom environments.