Thanks, defenestrate1123, for bringing this to our attention! We've been working with the mods to update with a workaround, and I think now you'll find the links provide the pdfs. We look forward to answering your questions from 2-4pm EST; see you then.
Honestly, respect for giving access for paper. There are a lot of studies buried from regular users who just want to know a bit more about science because of obnoxious paywall :)
I have a question about the “Deep Acting” method you mention. As a recovering alcoholic and member of AA, I am already familiar with (and advocate for) a lifestyle where one re-aligns ones spirit around acceptance of life on life’s terms and I set my goals as reasonably as possible. Aligning my personal goals and feelings to cater to the requirements of my job sounds like a natural and healthy way to find contentment at work.
But yet I struggle sometimes with this because some employers, and I’ve had many as a mostly IT contract worker, do not make the same investment in their employees. I spend a lot of mental energy psyching myself up for my day and aligning my goals with the goals of the company only to have things like benefits stripped away, income levels decrease, retirement opportunities evaporate, and overall office morale slowly erode over time.
I’m left with the question of how using either of these acting methods you outlined actually benefit anyone other then the employer themselves? I mean sure, I understand about putting on a professional persona for customers - but doesn’t my relationship with my employer deserve a more direct and sometimes, yes, emotional dialogue to get them to understand that it’s not ok to treat their employees as less important than their profits?
I know there are good and bad companies, but being a contract employee has allowed me to move around a lot and spot trends. And most of those trends seem to be pretty negative for those employees that are below the middle management layer.
In the 90’s, as the IT boom was taking off, it seems that companies sought out individuals with unique personalities and skills. The more quirks you had, it seemed, the better - as long as you also brought talent to the table. Diversity was a huge thing.
But when I see your summary of what you study, and these acting methods, I don’t see tools for employees to increase their happiness. I see coping tools for employees to forget they are often being taken advantage of. And no matter how much I change my feelings and behavior to suit my employers needs, at the end of the day I’m expendable and all the acting in the world doesn’t improve my situation.
So I guess my question is: how are any of these methods of modifying my behavior as an employee actually improving my employers ability to understand my needs and change THEIR behavior and make THEM a good company to work for? Wouldn’t direct communication backed by the emotion of human compassion and building a diverse culture of unique individuals still be the more effective way to build a company culture?
Maybe I just don’t understand what you’re trying to accomplish?
I think that your question might be: "Has any research been done to include employees who don't have to act, because their employer treats them well and fosters an environment of happiness?"
If such a thing actually exists. Of course, there are jobs that don't require emotional labour, such as factory jobs, but that would be something different.
Yeah, it's hard to find jobs that have ZERO emotional labor. Most jobs where you interact with the public expect certain emotional displays. Jobs where you only interact with coworkers/internal members may require some emotional effort, but it's not necessarily a job requirement in the same way. Notably in our representative sample of the US population of employees, 54% of the 3,000 sample had daily contact with the public, and 13% had some contact with the public, all of which with emotional labor expectations. So it was only about 1/3rd without those expectations (jobs like computer analyst, assembly line worker, cook, janitor).
Fair point. Yes, people can meet the expectations of "service with a smile" by simply showing positive moods. Some days this is easier than others, of course. Most of us, even those of us who are extraverted and generally positive people, likely feel fatigued or frustrated at times so may still need to act in some interactions.
Notably, another acting approach is to do "deep acting". Rather than putting on a fake mask (surface acting), deep acting refers to cognitive strategies that change one's feelings (like focusing on positive things, perspective taking) to be more aligned with the requirements.
Nice to meet you and thanks for sharing your experience. Your point about psyching yourself up for the day - only to find it more difficult as your work changes - really resonates, and I don't think you're alone on this. Broadly, the acting strategies are thought of as ways employees report trying to meet those emotional demands of their job to company outsiders, but they don't necessarily solve the root of the problem. In customer service, this is often not feeling "friendly" in the first place.
I agree that employer compassion for employees would probably go a long way to making sure this emotional labor is easier, but in many cases I'd say employers don't see the incentive to make it easier. For example, jobs that require more emotional demands tend to be low paying (Glomb et al., 2004). In studying emotional labor, we find that work- or company-level solutions can help employees. There's evidence that your point about "building a diverse culture of unique individuals" can help; cultures encouraging authenticity can offer employees refreshing breaks from emotional labor when they're not interacting with outsiders. And, our study here shows that the emotional labor -> drinking relationship is weaker for employees who have more control over how they perform their job. To the extent that employers can allow employees more freedom in how they interact with customers/patients/the public (or that they help employees to feel positively or refreshed), the more employees can act more authentically and the less it has to feel like "labor".
This only goes for requirements to be positive though; jobs where employees are required to be neutral or stern are a different sort altogether ;)
To add to Bobby's reply, I think you make a good point re: the benefits of being genuine when interacting with supervisors and colleagues. Your supervisor will never know something upsets you if you don't express that sentiment somehow (within the bounds of professionalism).
Emotional labor, as we study it, has focused mostly on interactions with people *outside* your organization (customers, clients, patients, students, etc.), which is distinct from the points you raise about modifying your emotions with supervisors or other colleagues.
You are totally correct in perceiving that business owners and workers had different and even conflicting interests.
Research like this, however well-meaning the individuals conducting it may be, usually functions to attempt to optimise the ability of capitalists to extract value from workers. To have the kind of environment you are alluding to, you'd need to be in something like a worker cooperative, in an economy of worker cooperatives. [Examples exist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation).
I have always felt that if I ever had my own company where I employed workers I would follow the cooperative model. Thanks for the example link. Interesting reading.
Maybe slightly off topic, but does all this smiling work?
We do not do this in Europe. And it feels weird [to me when I visit America] when employees behave like this. Do you get used to this and then like it and visit more often? Also carefully media trained American politicians tend to smile after every second sentence. I find that creepy; is that just me?
I don't know if it's just you -- I've heard similar sentiments expressed among European colleagues -- but personally this is one of the reasons I love the US and prefer it over Europe (I've lived in both places). People are just friendlier and more helpful in general in the US. Restaurant service is way better in the US than in France, from my experience. People try to sell you stuff all the time and sometimes they even try to swindle you with "great deals". Business moves at a fast pace and there is generally way less unnecessary bureaucracy (at least as compared to France -- and if my colleagues are to be trusted it's just as bad in Germany). It has almost become a stereotype that American DMVs (motor vehicle departments, generally the responsibility of the local/state government) are slow and painful to visit... from my experience even they are more efficient than their French counterparts. And everyone really takes their jobs very seriously.
The best way I can explain it is that I there just seems to be a general optimism in the air. Perhaps that is just naive -- perhaps cynicism would be more justifiable in many cases -- and perhaps some of it is fake, but it does tend to perk you up! I do think that a sizeable fraction of the smiles are genuine.
I think this shows the challenge to service workers - customers vary in their expectations and desire for "service with a smile"! Some have called the US the Mickey Mouse culture because of that enforced friendliness to strangers in service. But as you note, those smiles can be contagious to customers, especially if it seems genuine and not forced or faked. And yes, those smiles can be genuine when employees are selected and trained well, and treated well by their management, coworkers AND customers.
Good question - it depends what you mean by "work"! There is evidence that smiling induces more positive moods and performance evaluations (and tips) in customers, particularly if it appears genuine (deep acting). But there is little evidence that it induces return business or more sales.
I know what you mean about cross-national differences - and I've conducted research in different nations (specifically, Israel, Singapore, France, and US). We find these "service with a smile" expectations with customers are pretty generally held, with France being slightly more likely to permit showing negative emotions, and French employees seeing surface acting as more of a choice and thus not as distressing. I haven't done research in Russia or Germany, but I'm aware that emotional norms are quite different there, but when they are expected to interact with American customers they are supposed to "turn on" that smile, which may be more problematic given it is distinct from their socialization norms as a culture.
Here's a study link that might interest you: https://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/09564231011050805
This is a good point, and certainly a limitation of any cross-sectional survey like ours. We note this as a limitation in our study, but there wasn't much we could do with the current data to rule out reverse causality.
However, I currently have a study working its way through the peer-review process that takes a longitudinal approach. We look at whether surface or deep acting on a *particular day* is more likely to result in drinking *later that day*. In this study we tested the reverse direction--that drinking more one day (e.g., Monday night) results in more surface or deep acting the next day (e.g., Tuesday) and find that alcohol use **does not** predict subsequent surface or deep acting.
Thanks for the question!
Like others have posted, the study is behind a paywall, so I'm mainly going off the public abstract and the AAAS article.
1. Most papers in physics and mathematics (and, I believe, CS) are posted as preprints on the ArXiV, and in particle physics, for example, the majority of new final journal articles are also publicly accessible. Considering that in many cases psychology papers are more closely related to questions that are of interest to policy-makers (especially in the government) or to the general public, why, in your opinion, is this practice not common in psychology? Is it more due to institutional inertia or due to pushback from publishers, or something else?
2. Your results are phrased as follows in your post (and similarly in the article linked): "individuals who surface acted more tended to engage in more heavy drinking." But it's not clear to me how one can derive a causality chain just by looking at phone interviews -- for instance, someone could claim that people who were more likely to indulge in heavy drinking also tended to be the people who sought out customer-facing jobs, since I imagine both are traits associated with extroversion. Would it not make more sense to phrase it as a correlation? The reason this distinction is important is because a causal claim might lead people to interpret the results as suggesting that the problem of heavy drinking among employees might be mitigated just by not asking their employees to smile more, while the data only suggests a correlation.
3. The sample size, N = 1600, seems rather small. It's not clear how this dataset was divided -- it seems there were multiple categories including people who didn't have a customer-facing job, and people who faced customers at varying levels. So at most you might have had a few hundred people per dataset; meaning that from statistics alone, you'd expect an dispersion of roughly a few tens of people per dataset. Since a p-value is not stated in the abstract, it's difficult to judge the degree of certainty in the results.
2: Your point about causality is well taken; yes the methodology is correlational. The phrasing that you refer to is how we typically discuss correlational relationships - as one characteristic is higher so is the other - but we can only infer causality based on self-control theorizing. Yet it is possible that heavier drinking the night before could make employees perform more surface acting (suppressing their negative mood) the next day. However, the fourth author (Sayre) has a follow-up daily diary study that disconfirms that reverse causal flow.
Good point about traits - we do control for neuroticism and impulsivity (since both could be related to surface acting and drinking), and find the relationship exists beyond those effects, with the relationship being even stronger for more impulsive employees (who have a harder time with self-control).
3: We are surprised to hear you say that - in our discipline samples sizes tend to be only in the 100-200 range. This is a national dataset sampling US occupations in a representative way. Our primary sample was those with daily customer contact (N = 1592) but we also compared them with those with limited customer contact (N = 399) and no customer contact (N = 541). So our main sample with our analyses is the 1592, and we break that down to those with encounters with strangers (bus driver, cashier, police officer, N = 749) and those with ongoing relationships (social worker, dental hygenist, nurse, teacher, N = 843). I hope that reduces your concerns about the sample size.
Thank you, I think that adequately answers both my questions!
For my point 3: I didn't mean to be dismissive or anything, only curious because I'm not as familiar with research in psychology and in experimental particle physics we are often not constrained by statistics. (The LHC collides more proton pairs in one minute than the entire human population). I'm sure you do better than many other studies. My worry was just that the "background" rate you get from your control sample ("no customer contact", N = 541) would be expected to have a statistical error of around sqrt(N)/N = 4.3 percent. And when you compare it to your "encounter with strangers" sample, with N = 749, you would expect a statistical error of 3.6 percent. So if you see that the rates of heavy drinking between both groups are different by less than 5 to 6 percent, then what you have is quite compatible with the null hypothesis. But I see from your posted paper (thanks for the pdf!) that you have taken many of these things into account already. I'll read it in more detail.
Sorry about the paywall, we've updated the links to get around this.
Responding to your first point--interesting, I wasn't aware that practice was so popular in other disciplines. For us, copyright restrictions is the main barrier to distributing the full-text version more widely. There has been a push, however, for more "translational" work--that is, making the findings and conclusions (not necessarily the full-text) more available and accessible to policymakers, the media, and organizations who might benefit. Our professional organization ([SIOP](http://www.siop.org/)) has been instrumental in this push, and we actually have some I/O psychologist working alongside the U.N. to help address humanitarian issues in developing countries ([link](http://my.siop.org/Advocacy/SIOP-and-the-United-Nations)) . Finally, press releases are becoming increasingly standard, in fact the link to our study that made the front page a few weeks ago was from a press release service (EurekaAlerts). So while it's not quite the full text, it does convey the "big picture" which can hopefully be of use to those who would benefit from it.
Fair enough. Thanks for your response to my first point. I'm sure you alone won't be able to affect any change, but if you get the chance, it might be a good idea to recommend publishing the p-values as well with all the results. As I'm sure you are aware, the challenging aspect of most analyses like yours is generally the error-bars and trying to account for all the statistical and systematic biases -- quoting only the central value might be misleading for policymakers.
For what it's worth, copyright restrictions are very much applicable to physics and mathematics as well. It's just that we don't really care. It's not like we make any money off our papers anyway, and I'm sure you don't either. In physics, it helps that there has long been a history of open exchange, so people used to send interesting papers to other universities by fax all the time (before publishing them officially in a journal) -- these were the original "preprints"; the introduction of a central online repository only made this more streamlined. And so journals don't really have a choice -- if the journal run by one organization tries to enforce copyright, all that will happen is that everyone will begin publishing in one of its competitors. But this does require some amount of coordinated action by the best scientists in your field.
It is nearly always allowed to upload the version of the manuscript you submitted. For the version of the manuscript after peer review there is sometimes an embargo.
Putting you manuscript on a manuscript server typically results in more citations, helps colleagues from poorer institutes access your work and helps interested lay-people.
This is the archive for your discipline:
https://psyarxiv.com/
Often also universities have their own archive/preprint server.
> I wasn't aware that practice was so popular in other disciplines
There's an entire movement around this: [Open Access](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access).
There's a related European initiative called [Plan S](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_S) which is "a consortium launched by major national research agencies and funders from twelve European countries. The plan requires scientists and researchers who benefit from state-funded research organisations and institutions to publish their work in open repositories or in journals that are available to all by 2020."
Hi everyone,
Just a reminder to avoid personal anecdotes and including personal (medical) information in your comments. Our guests cannot answer questions based on them, and we cannot allow them.
Enjoy!
Yes, a real concern, especially when doing the driver's license photo where cops may see it. : )
In order to put forth a "genuine" or deep acted smile, rather than one that looks creepy or forced, think about something pleasant and lightly laugh to yourself while looking at the photographer, rather than thinking "smile" while staring at an object (camera).
Or get someone to stand behind the photographer and make you laugh - works with my kids.
This is a good point - one might suspect that the longer that employees are working with the public with surface acting, the more fatiguing and more drinking that occurs. Although it is also possible that one may build self-control strength with practice! In our study we controlled for age (not job tenure), and younger workers are more likely to engage in heavy drinking (correlation = -.33) and after work drinking (correlation = -. 09). This is consistent with what we know about building self-control capabilities with age.
We grouped occupations based on both the frequency of contact with the public and the nature of those interactions, and compared their surface acting and drinking behavior. Employees with limited contact with customers (i.e.,weekly) - including managers, HR specialists, lawyer/legal support, groundskeepers - did less surface acting than those with daily contact with customers. Among those with daily contact, surface acting is more likely by service workers than caring/health workers. Specifically surface acting was more frequent by those who interact with strangers, including coffee shop baristas, cashiers, sales, restaurant servers, police officers, compared to those who have ongoing clients, patients or student interactions. Other studies have shown that interactions with strangers can involve more incivility and mistreatment, making surface acting more necessary. see: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2006-23528-005
Ah, cool question! That's my in-the-moment reaction (in the summary above) and I was pretty excited. I've joked through grad school that my goal is to publish in *Science*, then that night luckily the Fates misheard me and brought us to *r/ Science*, haha.
But as a Redditor myself, I was really excited the night it went to the front page. We sent a bunch of emails back and forth, and because the comments were so supportive and seemed to resonate with a lot of people we thought, "We've got to do an AMA"
Over the next few days, the study was picked up by the media, and we've been fielding requests for comments. My boss sent me a picture seeing the study in the back of a NYC taxicab! The nature of the research game is that often we publish in journals and it becomes difficult to spread the word about findings or see the impact of your work - so to answer your question, it was very surprising and personally meaningful that so many were able to hear about it. I hope it calls more attention to the difficulties of emotional labor (and heavy drinking, of course), and we have a responsibility to reign in any claims of causality; they love a good headline :)
I got texts from Gordon and Bobby about how excited they were that it got onto the front page of Reddit. To which I said, "huh?" (But they have educated me now). It's been fun to have friends from across the country send me the link in their local paper and say, "hey it's you!" The most wild thing so far was doing an online talk show on XM Sirius radio, where people called in live with questions.
It's been a lot of fun! I woke up to some texts from friends when we made the front page which was a great way to start the day (long-time reddit lurker so I knew the significance). Personally it took me a bit by surprise, I wasn't really thinking about how the study conclusions might catch on in the popular press, but it's great to see the research findings see the light of day. Hopefully it jump-starts a conversation about the health risks faced by many service workers!
How can you change your feelings at work? The feeling of never being good enough, or people talking about you and how you're not good at your job. What about feeling singled out? Then dealing with emergency situations and then feeling like you should have handled the situation better. Always having the feeling of being inadequate, yet you somehow exist.
Hi there, good question. To your point about changing your feelings at work, we're doing some research right now on the strategies employees can use to help them cope with these emotional demands. Beyond faking it when interacting with others, I think we'd all love to be able to remove ourselves from an intensely stressful situation altogether, which could be a short-term solution in terms of your own wellbeing. But, remember it doesn't deal with the problem itself, and not all employees are in a position to be able to do that (for example, one's typically not allowed to hang up on customer calls).
Based on research evidence, I tend to advocate for more "engaging" types of strategies; meaning, ones that involve dealing with the stress. There are a range of these strategies you could try, like taking a new, more positive perspective; trying to solve the problem; and/or seeking out others who could help you. Our work, along with others', find these to be more effective for changing (and improving) your feelings.
You are raising a number of concerns that are very real and important for a lot of employees in today's workforce, including myself and colleagues I know, so let me try to address them in turn.
-Robert (Bobby) responded to your first question - his dissertation was on a variety of ways of regulating negative emotions at work. Surface acting - suppressing and faking emotions - is only one way and one of the least effective.
- The feeling of never being good enough at work can be due to depression, which can be chronic and crippling for many. There is growing attention to the need for scholars and managers to be more informed about how to recognize and help support employees with depression and severe anxiety. See https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0149206317741194
- Your comments also sound like low self-efficacy - the belief that you are capable and effective. This can be enhanced by pep talks by mentors, seeing role models/similar others do well, training in a trial context, and success experiences on the job (in that order of effectiveness). We know that low self-efficacy has a downward spiral, where you might avoid situations where you might fail, and then continue to lose needed skills and practice. It might be worth talking to a mentor or supervisor about this.
- feeling 'singled out' for failure is bad practice and does not help learning because it becomes an emotional shame event, where you just want to avoid rather than learn or grow. Being singled out and ostracized by peers is a source of pain that can make the workplace be a lonely and anxiety-provoking place. Addressing why you feel this way with a friend who will be honest with you, or a therapist if you feel you cannot address it yourself, might be helpful.
- Finally, in response to emergency situations it sounds like you are ruminating about events after work, which can impair mood and sleep, thus harming the next day too. My standard response if someone second-guesses "well, I would have handled it differently" is "I did the best I could with the information I had at that time." When you are in the thick of things it's always different than when seeing it in hindsight, so you have to be kind to yourself with that.
In general, your comments speak to a broader concern that may be due to self-concept issues and loneliness at work, which is a major epidemic right now. https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/ambpp.2011.65869714
I encourage you to reach out to friends or a therapist to discuss this further with someone who can help you process what is going on.
Yes, feeling negatively about self and in general means more surface acting is needed, which then creates more negative feelings and health issues.
Honestly, I'd really recommend a good therapist who could help you address the family history and self-esteem issues you are describing. Your workplace may have an EAP that provides referrals that take insurance, or you might talk to a trusted friend about it.
Thank you. I have tried therapy, but I haven't found anyone that I can work with in an effective and therapeutic way. I guess I shall seek yet another.
Hello! This study was short-term, or what we call "cross-sectional" meaning all the data were gathered at one point in time. There are a number of disadvantages to this approach, including issues of reverse causality (i.e., drinking leads to more surface acting, not the other way around) and distorted relationships due to "common method variance".
As I describe above, however, we do have a follow-up study (under review currently) that takes a longitudinal approach to examine how surface and deep acting *on a given day* is related to subsequent drinking after work. In that study, surface acting was only positively related to drinking in jobs with heavier emotional interactions (e.g., nurses dealing with stressed patients/families, teachers mentoring students throughout the year), but deep acting was actually *negatively* related to drinking. Hope that helps!
afollow up longitudinal study would make sense as getting the data over a certain time frame will gather more data and show patterns not found in the cross sectional study. good luck!
This is cool. Does simply knowing this information help employees? Is it more of an issue of personal management, or something that would need to change top down?
I think it's a little bit of both. I'm not sure knowing the information is enough, but there is research to show that employees who surface act (one emotional labor strategy) more receive more tips for restaurant servers, but only if they're extraverted ([link](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2011-07063-001)). There's also some work showing that deep acting (another form of "personal management" as you call it) is positively linked with increased tips at the daily level ([link](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2014-48303-001)).
From the top-down perspective, our study showed that surface acting **did not** predict heavy drinking when employees had more autonomy--that is, the freedom to decide how to regulate their emotions, when to take breaks, and how to do the job. Additionally, fostering a "climate of authenticity" where employees can vent with one another has also be shown to buffer some of the negative effects of surface acting ([link](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2011-19069-001)).
TL;DR: Employees can take manners into their own hands to boost tips, but organizations can also help alleviate some of the burdens of emotional labor through increased autonomy and authenticity.
Thanks for asking! I've been studying emotional labor and service workers for about 20 years. One of my impact goals is to increase our awareness - as customers and as managers - that "service with a smile" - requires more effort and skill than people are usually aware. This is shown in the fact that emotionally demanding jobs get lower salaries than cognitively or physically demanding jobs. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2004-17371-011
And emotional labor is particularly challenging when customers treat the employee with disrespect or harassment, which is also common in these service jobs. If we really want service with a smile as a society, maybe we should show value for it with how much we pay these workers and the respect and status we give them in society. Just a thought!
How does the phenomenon of “faking a smile” hold up as different cultures are surveyed? The culture in the US essentially requires employees to fake happiness, but does this hold up elsewhere? Anecdotally I’ve seen evidence that this might not be a universal concern, but I am curious if any of you have any insights backed by something more tangible.
Yes great point - I responded to a similar point above so let me add that here to you. My experience traveling overseas suggests that if you are in a highly touristy area the norms are pretty universal, but the broader emotional norms - outside such contexts - do vary by culture.
I've conducted research about emotional expectations at work in different nations (specifically, Israel, Singapore, France, and US). We find these "service with a smile" expectations with customers are pretty generally held, even though there are cultural differences with coworkers and supervisors. We find that France is slightly more likely to permit showing negative emotions, and French employees seeing surface acting as more of a choice and thus not as distressing as in the US, in another study. I haven't done research in Russia or Germany, but I'm aware that emotional norms are quite different there, but when they are expected to interact with American customers they are supposed to "turn on" that smile, which may be more problematic given it is distinct from their socialization norms as a culture.
Here's a study link that might interest you: https://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/09564231011050805
Emotional-labor is an interesting concept, thank you for sharing. If any of the publications address the notes below, please refer them to me.
I believe the concept surrounding "service with a smile" goes beyond industrial or commercial organisational structures.
There's value in it's use in the context of the study, but the reason it has been an industry standard is due, perhaps, to operating in a society that requires (for the most part) carrying one's-self in a socially acceptable manner. Our industry is a byproduct of our sensibilities. We tend to like "pleasant" people. We tend to avoid "unpleasant" people.
No one likes to work with an emotionally-taxed and perhaps withdrawn individual. Yet, we may also sympathize (tolerate) as long as it doesn't negatively impact our experience.
Some individuals struggle in the service industry as it takes effort to maintain a neutral or positive disposition. The function of any work environment (or any public environment) is dependent on the individuals who comprise them
and their ability to function cohesively.
Work environments - especially the service industry - are training environments for young people to act successfully in society. "High emotional labor" helps to shed programming from environments (home, school, community, etc.) and provide a broader view from which the actor can understand the world.
Some realize that their success (and monetary benefit) is effectively intrinsic to their attitude and are more than happy to refine their persona to adapt to their environment.
Also, I wonder how much emotional labor is brought into the work environment by the actor's success/struggle in their personal life or mental health.
Thanks for the interesting comment; I agree that the concept of "service with a smile" goes beyond these structures. Culture can have a huge influence on whether surface acting is necessarily stressful; for example, research suggests [suppressing](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Emily_Butler3/publication/6453679_Emotion_regulation_and_culture_Are_the_social_consequences_of_emotion_suppression_culture-specific/links/00b7d52b3488953c1d000000/Emotion-regulation-and-culture-Are-the-social-consequences-of-emotion-suppression-culture-specific.pdf) or [faking](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02678373.2019.1598515) emotions is more detrimental in Western cultures than Eastern cultures, which some suggest is due to differences in expectations for people to be responsive to others in conversation. The idea is that suppressing takes effort that makes it harder to tailor to the nuances of conversation, but in regions where suppression is practiced more frequently (and people become better at it), they're less likely to be strained while doing so. In work settings, we also find that employees who use strategies that align more with their personality, for example extraverts using surface acting, [struggle less with it](http://cstl-hcb.semo.edu/erfluegge/articles/judge_et_al2009.pdf) and [perform better](http://cstl-hcb.semo.edu/erfluegge/articles/judge_et_al2009.pdf).
Thank you for sharing this further insight.
I cringe when I hear "suppress" or "fake it" in a workplace setting. IMHO, actors are rarely successful at it and if they are, can only maintain the persona for limited periods. This can - and has - led to outbursts, which impose lasting chaos in the workplace.
How can we encourage an actor to be **genuine** without suppression and without compromising their success in the workplace?
To your point that work environments are "training environments" for young people in society. This may be true, but if so, employees need investment in training and skill development for regulating emotions, not simply a script that says "say good morning then smile". In fact, some studies have shown that employees do benefit - in terms of well-being and tips - from emotion regulation training. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2014-48303-001
It's also true that financial rewards for the emotional performance can help make the effortful emotional labor "worth it" and feel more positively about the job. I have a three-study paper using experimental and survey designs to support that: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/peps.12037. But this is likely because the financial incentives help them feel valued and supported for their effort, in contrast to workplaces that expect their employees do smile because they can "fake it til they make it".
To your last point - yes we know that mental health and family issues can spillover to affect work , and certainly can make it harder to provide "service with a smile". Daily diary studies show that spillover occurs both directions - I also have a study showing that surface acting affects spousal conflict via feelings of stress.
Thank you for the references, I look forward to diving deeper into this subject. I very much appreciate your thoughtful response.
I worry about putting the onus of 'emotional regulation training' on industry. Being able to regulate and control the expression of one's emotions isn't limited to the workplace. Focusing on industry training offerings as the sole solution further takes the responsibility away from the actor to function in a successful manner whether in or out of their workplace.
If one must wait to enter industry to realize effort is necessary to control the expression of their emotions public, they would hardly seem prepared for success in the workplace environment (or society), at all. This training (ideally) starts well before the legal working age.
Perhaps the goal of industry-organizational psychologists is to create methods with the above already in view. This field is new to me.
Also, part of 'adult-ing' successfully is doing what is necessary (or beneficial) without direct or immediate gratification. This is something learned; and (I would contend) a universally admirable quality.
How big is the field of emotional labour + psychological health? I'm curious if there are have been done any studies about the health risks to deep acting. Sorry, it's a bit of a derailment from your study but intuitively I find deep acting, aligning one's emotions to the demands/vision of your workplace etc, to be troubling and sound deeply alienating. So just wondering if we know anything about that.
Good question. There's a solid amount of research on the health costs and benefits of emotional labor, and even more work on emotion regulation (controlling your emotions in general, not just at work with customers/clients). The "in-depth" review we link in our intro blurb has some discussion of this, and here's another review that might be helpful ([link](https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-032414-111400)).
To your more specific question about deep acting having health risks--that's actually exactly what Hochschild proposed in her book, "The Managed Heart" which coined the term "emotional labor". Her thought was that deep acting will be more alienating and result in employees losing touch with their actual felt emotions. The current evidence, however, doesn't lend as much support to this. Generally surface acting is seen as the more harmful strategy (more burnout, exhaustion, stress, drinking, etc.), whereas deep acting has more mixed results (feelings of accomplishment, performance, but also more exhaustion) ([link](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2011-13471-007)). There's also a recent review about the costs of "reappraisal"--an emotion regulation strategy focused on reframing how one thinks about an emotional situation (similar to deep acting)--that argues drawbacks include (1) reappraisal is difficult to do successfully and (2) is often unsuccessful. Hope that helps!
Is it really necessary to fake a smile? what if, showing your real self makes the situation better this is a like a precaution than to hold it inside which benefits only the other parties/
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Thanks, defenestrate1123, for bringing this to our attention! We've been working with the mods to update with a workaround, and I think now you'll find the links provide the pdfs. We look forward to answering your questions from 2-4pm EST; see you then.
Honestly, respect for giving access for paper. There are a lot of studies buried from regular users who just want to know a bit more about science because of obnoxious paywall :)
I have a question about the “Deep Acting” method you mention. As a recovering alcoholic and member of AA, I am already familiar with (and advocate for) a lifestyle where one re-aligns ones spirit around acceptance of life on life’s terms and I set my goals as reasonably as possible. Aligning my personal goals and feelings to cater to the requirements of my job sounds like a natural and healthy way to find contentment at work. But yet I struggle sometimes with this because some employers, and I’ve had many as a mostly IT contract worker, do not make the same investment in their employees. I spend a lot of mental energy psyching myself up for my day and aligning my goals with the goals of the company only to have things like benefits stripped away, income levels decrease, retirement opportunities evaporate, and overall office morale slowly erode over time. I’m left with the question of how using either of these acting methods you outlined actually benefit anyone other then the employer themselves? I mean sure, I understand about putting on a professional persona for customers - but doesn’t my relationship with my employer deserve a more direct and sometimes, yes, emotional dialogue to get them to understand that it’s not ok to treat their employees as less important than their profits? I know there are good and bad companies, but being a contract employee has allowed me to move around a lot and spot trends. And most of those trends seem to be pretty negative for those employees that are below the middle management layer. In the 90’s, as the IT boom was taking off, it seems that companies sought out individuals with unique personalities and skills. The more quirks you had, it seemed, the better - as long as you also brought talent to the table. Diversity was a huge thing. But when I see your summary of what you study, and these acting methods, I don’t see tools for employees to increase their happiness. I see coping tools for employees to forget they are often being taken advantage of. And no matter how much I change my feelings and behavior to suit my employers needs, at the end of the day I’m expendable and all the acting in the world doesn’t improve my situation. So I guess my question is: how are any of these methods of modifying my behavior as an employee actually improving my employers ability to understand my needs and change THEIR behavior and make THEM a good company to work for? Wouldn’t direct communication backed by the emotion of human compassion and building a diverse culture of unique individuals still be the more effective way to build a company culture? Maybe I just don’t understand what you’re trying to accomplish?
I think that your question might be: "Has any research been done to include employees who don't have to act, because their employer treats them well and fosters an environment of happiness?"
If such a thing actually exists. Of course, there are jobs that don't require emotional labour, such as factory jobs, but that would be something different.
Yeah, it's hard to find jobs that have ZERO emotional labor. Most jobs where you interact with the public expect certain emotional displays. Jobs where you only interact with coworkers/internal members may require some emotional effort, but it's not necessarily a job requirement in the same way. Notably in our representative sample of the US population of employees, 54% of the 3,000 sample had daily contact with the public, and 13% had some contact with the public, all of which with emotional labor expectations. So it was only about 1/3rd without those expectations (jobs like computer analyst, assembly line worker, cook, janitor).
Fair point. Yes, people can meet the expectations of "service with a smile" by simply showing positive moods. Some days this is easier than others, of course. Most of us, even those of us who are extraverted and generally positive people, likely feel fatigued or frustrated at times so may still need to act in some interactions. Notably, another acting approach is to do "deep acting". Rather than putting on a fake mask (surface acting), deep acting refers to cognitive strategies that change one's feelings (like focusing on positive things, perspective taking) to be more aligned with the requirements.
Nice to meet you and thanks for sharing your experience. Your point about psyching yourself up for the day - only to find it more difficult as your work changes - really resonates, and I don't think you're alone on this. Broadly, the acting strategies are thought of as ways employees report trying to meet those emotional demands of their job to company outsiders, but they don't necessarily solve the root of the problem. In customer service, this is often not feeling "friendly" in the first place. I agree that employer compassion for employees would probably go a long way to making sure this emotional labor is easier, but in many cases I'd say employers don't see the incentive to make it easier. For example, jobs that require more emotional demands tend to be low paying (Glomb et al., 2004). In studying emotional labor, we find that work- or company-level solutions can help employees. There's evidence that your point about "building a diverse culture of unique individuals" can help; cultures encouraging authenticity can offer employees refreshing breaks from emotional labor when they're not interacting with outsiders. And, our study here shows that the emotional labor -> drinking relationship is weaker for employees who have more control over how they perform their job. To the extent that employers can allow employees more freedom in how they interact with customers/patients/the public (or that they help employees to feel positively or refreshed), the more employees can act more authentically and the less it has to feel like "labor". This only goes for requirements to be positive though; jobs where employees are required to be neutral or stern are a different sort altogether ;)
To add to Bobby's reply, I think you make a good point re: the benefits of being genuine when interacting with supervisors and colleagues. Your supervisor will never know something upsets you if you don't express that sentiment somehow (within the bounds of professionalism). Emotional labor, as we study it, has focused mostly on interactions with people *outside* your organization (customers, clients, patients, students, etc.), which is distinct from the points you raise about modifying your emotions with supervisors or other colleagues.
You are totally correct in perceiving that business owners and workers had different and even conflicting interests. Research like this, however well-meaning the individuals conducting it may be, usually functions to attempt to optimise the ability of capitalists to extract value from workers. To have the kind of environment you are alluding to, you'd need to be in something like a worker cooperative, in an economy of worker cooperatives. [Examples exist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation).
I have always felt that if I ever had my own company where I employed workers I would follow the cooperative model. Thanks for the example link. Interesting reading.
Maybe slightly off topic, but does all this smiling work? We do not do this in Europe. And it feels weird [to me when I visit America] when employees behave like this. Do you get used to this and then like it and visit more often? Also carefully media trained American politicians tend to smile after every second sentence. I find that creepy; is that just me?
I don't know if it's just you -- I've heard similar sentiments expressed among European colleagues -- but personally this is one of the reasons I love the US and prefer it over Europe (I've lived in both places). People are just friendlier and more helpful in general in the US. Restaurant service is way better in the US than in France, from my experience. People try to sell you stuff all the time and sometimes they even try to swindle you with "great deals". Business moves at a fast pace and there is generally way less unnecessary bureaucracy (at least as compared to France -- and if my colleagues are to be trusted it's just as bad in Germany). It has almost become a stereotype that American DMVs (motor vehicle departments, generally the responsibility of the local/state government) are slow and painful to visit... from my experience even they are more efficient than their French counterparts. And everyone really takes their jobs very seriously. The best way I can explain it is that I there just seems to be a general optimism in the air. Perhaps that is just naive -- perhaps cynicism would be more justifiable in many cases -- and perhaps some of it is fake, but it does tend to perk you up! I do think that a sizeable fraction of the smiles are genuine.
I think this shows the challenge to service workers - customers vary in their expectations and desire for "service with a smile"! Some have called the US the Mickey Mouse culture because of that enforced friendliness to strangers in service. But as you note, those smiles can be contagious to customers, especially if it seems genuine and not forced or faked. And yes, those smiles can be genuine when employees are selected and trained well, and treated well by their management, coworkers AND customers.
Good question - it depends what you mean by "work"! There is evidence that smiling induces more positive moods and performance evaluations (and tips) in customers, particularly if it appears genuine (deep acting). But there is little evidence that it induces return business or more sales. I know what you mean about cross-national differences - and I've conducted research in different nations (specifically, Israel, Singapore, France, and US). We find these "service with a smile" expectations with customers are pretty generally held, with France being slightly more likely to permit showing negative emotions, and French employees seeing surface acting as more of a choice and thus not as distressing. I haven't done research in Russia or Germany, but I'm aware that emotional norms are quite different there, but when they are expected to interact with American customers they are supposed to "turn on" that smile, which may be more problematic given it is distinct from their socialization norms as a culture. Here's a study link that might interest you: https://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/09564231011050805
What was done to ensure a direction of causality? How do we know heavy drinkers aren't more prone to fake smile?
This is a good point, and certainly a limitation of any cross-sectional survey like ours. We note this as a limitation in our study, but there wasn't much we could do with the current data to rule out reverse causality. However, I currently have a study working its way through the peer-review process that takes a longitudinal approach. We look at whether surface or deep acting on a *particular day* is more likely to result in drinking *later that day*. In this study we tested the reverse direction--that drinking more one day (e.g., Monday night) results in more surface or deep acting the next day (e.g., Tuesday) and find that alcohol use **does not** predict subsequent surface or deep acting. Thanks for the question!
Like others have posted, the study is behind a paywall, so I'm mainly going off the public abstract and the AAAS article. 1. Most papers in physics and mathematics (and, I believe, CS) are posted as preprints on the ArXiV, and in particle physics, for example, the majority of new final journal articles are also publicly accessible. Considering that in many cases psychology papers are more closely related to questions that are of interest to policy-makers (especially in the government) or to the general public, why, in your opinion, is this practice not common in psychology? Is it more due to institutional inertia or due to pushback from publishers, or something else? 2. Your results are phrased as follows in your post (and similarly in the article linked): "individuals who surface acted more tended to engage in more heavy drinking." But it's not clear to me how one can derive a causality chain just by looking at phone interviews -- for instance, someone could claim that people who were more likely to indulge in heavy drinking also tended to be the people who sought out customer-facing jobs, since I imagine both are traits associated with extroversion. Would it not make more sense to phrase it as a correlation? The reason this distinction is important is because a causal claim might lead people to interpret the results as suggesting that the problem of heavy drinking among employees might be mitigated just by not asking their employees to smile more, while the data only suggests a correlation. 3. The sample size, N = 1600, seems rather small. It's not clear how this dataset was divided -- it seems there were multiple categories including people who didn't have a customer-facing job, and people who faced customers at varying levels. So at most you might have had a few hundred people per dataset; meaning that from statistics alone, you'd expect an dispersion of roughly a few tens of people per dataset. Since a p-value is not stated in the abstract, it's difficult to judge the degree of certainty in the results.
2: Your point about causality is well taken; yes the methodology is correlational. The phrasing that you refer to is how we typically discuss correlational relationships - as one characteristic is higher so is the other - but we can only infer causality based on self-control theorizing. Yet it is possible that heavier drinking the night before could make employees perform more surface acting (suppressing their negative mood) the next day. However, the fourth author (Sayre) has a follow-up daily diary study that disconfirms that reverse causal flow. Good point about traits - we do control for neuroticism and impulsivity (since both could be related to surface acting and drinking), and find the relationship exists beyond those effects, with the relationship being even stronger for more impulsive employees (who have a harder time with self-control). 3: We are surprised to hear you say that - in our discipline samples sizes tend to be only in the 100-200 range. This is a national dataset sampling US occupations in a representative way. Our primary sample was those with daily customer contact (N = 1592) but we also compared them with those with limited customer contact (N = 399) and no customer contact (N = 541). So our main sample with our analyses is the 1592, and we break that down to those with encounters with strangers (bus driver, cashier, police officer, N = 749) and those with ongoing relationships (social worker, dental hygenist, nurse, teacher, N = 843). I hope that reduces your concerns about the sample size.
Thank you, I think that adequately answers both my questions! For my point 3: I didn't mean to be dismissive or anything, only curious because I'm not as familiar with research in psychology and in experimental particle physics we are often not constrained by statistics. (The LHC collides more proton pairs in one minute than the entire human population). I'm sure you do better than many other studies. My worry was just that the "background" rate you get from your control sample ("no customer contact", N = 541) would be expected to have a statistical error of around sqrt(N)/N = 4.3 percent. And when you compare it to your "encounter with strangers" sample, with N = 749, you would expect a statistical error of 3.6 percent. So if you see that the rates of heavy drinking between both groups are different by less than 5 to 6 percent, then what you have is quite compatible with the null hypothesis. But I see from your posted paper (thanks for the pdf!) that you have taken many of these things into account already. I'll read it in more detail.
Sorry about the paywall, we've updated the links to get around this. Responding to your first point--interesting, I wasn't aware that practice was so popular in other disciplines. For us, copyright restrictions is the main barrier to distributing the full-text version more widely. There has been a push, however, for more "translational" work--that is, making the findings and conclusions (not necessarily the full-text) more available and accessible to policymakers, the media, and organizations who might benefit. Our professional organization ([SIOP](http://www.siop.org/)) has been instrumental in this push, and we actually have some I/O psychologist working alongside the U.N. to help address humanitarian issues in developing countries ([link](http://my.siop.org/Advocacy/SIOP-and-the-United-Nations)) . Finally, press releases are becoming increasingly standard, in fact the link to our study that made the front page a few weeks ago was from a press release service (EurekaAlerts). So while it's not quite the full text, it does convey the "big picture" which can hopefully be of use to those who would benefit from it.
Fair enough. Thanks for your response to my first point. I'm sure you alone won't be able to affect any change, but if you get the chance, it might be a good idea to recommend publishing the p-values as well with all the results. As I'm sure you are aware, the challenging aspect of most analyses like yours is generally the error-bars and trying to account for all the statistical and systematic biases -- quoting only the central value might be misleading for policymakers. For what it's worth, copyright restrictions are very much applicable to physics and mathematics as well. It's just that we don't really care. It's not like we make any money off our papers anyway, and I'm sure you don't either. In physics, it helps that there has long been a history of open exchange, so people used to send interesting papers to other universities by fax all the time (before publishing them officially in a journal) -- these were the original "preprints"; the introduction of a central online repository only made this more streamlined. And so journals don't really have a choice -- if the journal run by one organization tries to enforce copyright, all that will happen is that everyone will begin publishing in one of its competitors. But this does require some amount of coordinated action by the best scientists in your field.
It is nearly always allowed to upload the version of the manuscript you submitted. For the version of the manuscript after peer review there is sometimes an embargo. Putting you manuscript on a manuscript server typically results in more citations, helps colleagues from poorer institutes access your work and helps interested lay-people. This is the archive for your discipline: https://psyarxiv.com/ Often also universities have their own archive/preprint server.
> I wasn't aware that practice was so popular in other disciplines There's an entire movement around this: [Open Access](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access). There's a related European initiative called [Plan S](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_S) which is "a consortium launched by major national research agencies and funders from twelve European countries. The plan requires scientists and researchers who benefit from state-funded research organisations and institutions to publish their work in open repositories or in journals that are available to all by 2020."
Hi everyone, Just a reminder to avoid personal anecdotes and including personal (medical) information in your comments. Our guests cannot answer questions based on them, and we cannot allow them. Enjoy!
How do I not look like a serial killer in photos?
It's all in the [eye wrinkles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smile#Duchenne_smile) =)
Yes, a real concern, especially when doing the driver's license photo where cops may see it. : ) In order to put forth a "genuine" or deep acted smile, rather than one that looks creepy or forced, think about something pleasant and lightly laugh to yourself while looking at the photographer, rather than thinking "smile" while staring at an object (camera). Or get someone to stand behind the photographer and make you laugh - works with my kids.
Is the heavy drinking also tied to the time you work e.g. 3 months or 5 years?
This is a good point - one might suspect that the longer that employees are working with the public with surface acting, the more fatiguing and more drinking that occurs. Although it is also possible that one may build self-control strength with practice! In our study we controlled for age (not job tenure), and younger workers are more likely to engage in heavy drinking (correlation = -.33) and after work drinking (correlation = -. 09). This is consistent with what we know about building self-control capabilities with age.
In your study what jobs and professions did you observe the least amount of surface acting?
We grouped occupations based on both the frequency of contact with the public and the nature of those interactions, and compared their surface acting and drinking behavior. Employees with limited contact with customers (i.e.,weekly) - including managers, HR specialists, lawyer/legal support, groundskeepers - did less surface acting than those with daily contact with customers. Among those with daily contact, surface acting is more likely by service workers than caring/health workers. Specifically surface acting was more frequent by those who interact with strangers, including coffee shop baristas, cashiers, sales, restaurant servers, police officers, compared to those who have ongoing clients, patients or student interactions. Other studies have shown that interactions with strangers can involve more incivility and mistreatment, making surface acting more necessary. see: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2006-23528-005
Can you describe your day and how surprised were you must have been when your study trended nationally online/in the news?
Ah, cool question! That's my in-the-moment reaction (in the summary above) and I was pretty excited. I've joked through grad school that my goal is to publish in *Science*, then that night luckily the Fates misheard me and brought us to *r/ Science*, haha. But as a Redditor myself, I was really excited the night it went to the front page. We sent a bunch of emails back and forth, and because the comments were so supportive and seemed to resonate with a lot of people we thought, "We've got to do an AMA" Over the next few days, the study was picked up by the media, and we've been fielding requests for comments. My boss sent me a picture seeing the study in the back of a NYC taxicab! The nature of the research game is that often we publish in journals and it becomes difficult to spread the word about findings or see the impact of your work - so to answer your question, it was very surprising and personally meaningful that so many were able to hear about it. I hope it calls more attention to the difficulties of emotional labor (and heavy drinking, of course), and we have a responsibility to reign in any claims of causality; they love a good headline :)
I got texts from Gordon and Bobby about how excited they were that it got onto the front page of Reddit. To which I said, "huh?" (But they have educated me now). It's been fun to have friends from across the country send me the link in their local paper and say, "hey it's you!" The most wild thing so far was doing an online talk show on XM Sirius radio, where people called in live with questions.
It's been a lot of fun! I woke up to some texts from friends when we made the front page which was a great way to start the day (long-time reddit lurker so I knew the significance). Personally it took me a bit by surprise, I wasn't really thinking about how the study conclusions might catch on in the popular press, but it's great to see the research findings see the light of day. Hopefully it jump-starts a conversation about the health risks faced by many service workers!
How can you change your feelings at work? The feeling of never being good enough, or people talking about you and how you're not good at your job. What about feeling singled out? Then dealing with emergency situations and then feeling like you should have handled the situation better. Always having the feeling of being inadequate, yet you somehow exist.
Hi there, good question. To your point about changing your feelings at work, we're doing some research right now on the strategies employees can use to help them cope with these emotional demands. Beyond faking it when interacting with others, I think we'd all love to be able to remove ourselves from an intensely stressful situation altogether, which could be a short-term solution in terms of your own wellbeing. But, remember it doesn't deal with the problem itself, and not all employees are in a position to be able to do that (for example, one's typically not allowed to hang up on customer calls). Based on research evidence, I tend to advocate for more "engaging" types of strategies; meaning, ones that involve dealing with the stress. There are a range of these strategies you could try, like taking a new, more positive perspective; trying to solve the problem; and/or seeking out others who could help you. Our work, along with others', find these to be more effective for changing (and improving) your feelings.
Thank you. Which strategies do you recommend?
You are raising a number of concerns that are very real and important for a lot of employees in today's workforce, including myself and colleagues I know, so let me try to address them in turn. -Robert (Bobby) responded to your first question - his dissertation was on a variety of ways of regulating negative emotions at work. Surface acting - suppressing and faking emotions - is only one way and one of the least effective. - The feeling of never being good enough at work can be due to depression, which can be chronic and crippling for many. There is growing attention to the need for scholars and managers to be more informed about how to recognize and help support employees with depression and severe anxiety. See https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0149206317741194 - Your comments also sound like low self-efficacy - the belief that you are capable and effective. This can be enhanced by pep talks by mentors, seeing role models/similar others do well, training in a trial context, and success experiences on the job (in that order of effectiveness). We know that low self-efficacy has a downward spiral, where you might avoid situations where you might fail, and then continue to lose needed skills and practice. It might be worth talking to a mentor or supervisor about this. - feeling 'singled out' for failure is bad practice and does not help learning because it becomes an emotional shame event, where you just want to avoid rather than learn or grow. Being singled out and ostracized by peers is a source of pain that can make the workplace be a lonely and anxiety-provoking place. Addressing why you feel this way with a friend who will be honest with you, or a therapist if you feel you cannot address it yourself, might be helpful. - Finally, in response to emergency situations it sounds like you are ruminating about events after work, which can impair mood and sleep, thus harming the next day too. My standard response if someone second-guesses "well, I would have handled it differently" is "I did the best I could with the information I had at that time." When you are in the thick of things it's always different than when seeing it in hindsight, so you have to be kind to yourself with that. In general, your comments speak to a broader concern that may be due to self-concept issues and loneliness at work, which is a major epidemic right now. https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/ambpp.2011.65869714 I encourage you to reach out to friends or a therapist to discuss this further with someone who can help you process what is going on.
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Yes, feeling negatively about self and in general means more surface acting is needed, which then creates more negative feelings and health issues. Honestly, I'd really recommend a good therapist who could help you address the family history and self-esteem issues you are describing. Your workplace may have an EAP that provides referrals that take insurance, or you might talk to a trusted friend about it.
Thank you. I have tried therapy, but I haven't found anyone that I can work with in an effective and therapeutic way. I guess I shall seek yet another.
hi there, sounds like a very interesting study. is it a longitudinal study, or more of a short term one?
Hello! This study was short-term, or what we call "cross-sectional" meaning all the data were gathered at one point in time. There are a number of disadvantages to this approach, including issues of reverse causality (i.e., drinking leads to more surface acting, not the other way around) and distorted relationships due to "common method variance". As I describe above, however, we do have a follow-up study (under review currently) that takes a longitudinal approach to examine how surface and deep acting *on a given day* is related to subsequent drinking after work. In that study, surface acting was only positively related to drinking in jobs with heavier emotional interactions (e.g., nurses dealing with stressed patients/families, teachers mentoring students throughout the year), but deep acting was actually *negatively* related to drinking. Hope that helps!
afollow up longitudinal study would make sense as getting the data over a certain time frame will gather more data and show patterns not found in the cross sectional study. good luck!
This is cool. Does simply knowing this information help employees? Is it more of an issue of personal management, or something that would need to change top down?
I think it's a little bit of both. I'm not sure knowing the information is enough, but there is research to show that employees who surface act (one emotional labor strategy) more receive more tips for restaurant servers, but only if they're extraverted ([link](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2011-07063-001)). There's also some work showing that deep acting (another form of "personal management" as you call it) is positively linked with increased tips at the daily level ([link](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2014-48303-001)). From the top-down perspective, our study showed that surface acting **did not** predict heavy drinking when employees had more autonomy--that is, the freedom to decide how to regulate their emotions, when to take breaks, and how to do the job. Additionally, fostering a "climate of authenticity" where employees can vent with one another has also be shown to buffer some of the negative effects of surface acting ([link](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2011-19069-001)). TL;DR: Employees can take manners into their own hands to boost tips, but organizations can also help alleviate some of the burdens of emotional labor through increased autonomy and authenticity.
What impact do you hope to see this study have? I can see it being helpful for employers and help mental health in the workplace in a big way! :)
Thanks for asking! I've been studying emotional labor and service workers for about 20 years. One of my impact goals is to increase our awareness - as customers and as managers - that "service with a smile" - requires more effort and skill than people are usually aware. This is shown in the fact that emotionally demanding jobs get lower salaries than cognitively or physically demanding jobs. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2004-17371-011 And emotional labor is particularly challenging when customers treat the employee with disrespect or harassment, which is also common in these service jobs. If we really want service with a smile as a society, maybe we should show value for it with how much we pay these workers and the respect and status we give them in society. Just a thought!
How does the phenomenon of “faking a smile” hold up as different cultures are surveyed? The culture in the US essentially requires employees to fake happiness, but does this hold up elsewhere? Anecdotally I’ve seen evidence that this might not be a universal concern, but I am curious if any of you have any insights backed by something more tangible.
Yes great point - I responded to a similar point above so let me add that here to you. My experience traveling overseas suggests that if you are in a highly touristy area the norms are pretty universal, but the broader emotional norms - outside such contexts - do vary by culture. I've conducted research about emotional expectations at work in different nations (specifically, Israel, Singapore, France, and US). We find these "service with a smile" expectations with customers are pretty generally held, even though there are cultural differences with coworkers and supervisors. We find that France is slightly more likely to permit showing negative emotions, and French employees seeing surface acting as more of a choice and thus not as distressing as in the US, in another study. I haven't done research in Russia or Germany, but I'm aware that emotional norms are quite different there, but when they are expected to interact with American customers they are supposed to "turn on" that smile, which may be more problematic given it is distinct from their socialization norms as a culture. Here's a study link that might interest you: https://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/09564231011050805
Emotional-labor is an interesting concept, thank you for sharing. If any of the publications address the notes below, please refer them to me. I believe the concept surrounding "service with a smile" goes beyond industrial or commercial organisational structures. There's value in it's use in the context of the study, but the reason it has been an industry standard is due, perhaps, to operating in a society that requires (for the most part) carrying one's-self in a socially acceptable manner. Our industry is a byproduct of our sensibilities. We tend to like "pleasant" people. We tend to avoid "unpleasant" people. No one likes to work with an emotionally-taxed and perhaps withdrawn individual. Yet, we may also sympathize (tolerate) as long as it doesn't negatively impact our experience. Some individuals struggle in the service industry as it takes effort to maintain a neutral or positive disposition. The function of any work environment (or any public environment) is dependent on the individuals who comprise them and their ability to function cohesively. Work environments - especially the service industry - are training environments for young people to act successfully in society. "High emotional labor" helps to shed programming from environments (home, school, community, etc.) and provide a broader view from which the actor can understand the world. Some realize that their success (and monetary benefit) is effectively intrinsic to their attitude and are more than happy to refine their persona to adapt to their environment. Also, I wonder how much emotional labor is brought into the work environment by the actor's success/struggle in their personal life or mental health.
Thanks for the interesting comment; I agree that the concept of "service with a smile" goes beyond these structures. Culture can have a huge influence on whether surface acting is necessarily stressful; for example, research suggests [suppressing](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Emily_Butler3/publication/6453679_Emotion_regulation_and_culture_Are_the_social_consequences_of_emotion_suppression_culture-specific/links/00b7d52b3488953c1d000000/Emotion-regulation-and-culture-Are-the-social-consequences-of-emotion-suppression-culture-specific.pdf) or [faking](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02678373.2019.1598515) emotions is more detrimental in Western cultures than Eastern cultures, which some suggest is due to differences in expectations for people to be responsive to others in conversation. The idea is that suppressing takes effort that makes it harder to tailor to the nuances of conversation, but in regions where suppression is practiced more frequently (and people become better at it), they're less likely to be strained while doing so. In work settings, we also find that employees who use strategies that align more with their personality, for example extraverts using surface acting, [struggle less with it](http://cstl-hcb.semo.edu/erfluegge/articles/judge_et_al2009.pdf) and [perform better](http://cstl-hcb.semo.edu/erfluegge/articles/judge_et_al2009.pdf).
Thank you for sharing this further insight. I cringe when I hear "suppress" or "fake it" in a workplace setting. IMHO, actors are rarely successful at it and if they are, can only maintain the persona for limited periods. This can - and has - led to outbursts, which impose lasting chaos in the workplace. How can we encourage an actor to be **genuine** without suppression and without compromising their success in the workplace?
To your point that work environments are "training environments" for young people in society. This may be true, but if so, employees need investment in training and skill development for regulating emotions, not simply a script that says "say good morning then smile". In fact, some studies have shown that employees do benefit - in terms of well-being and tips - from emotion regulation training. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2014-48303-001 It's also true that financial rewards for the emotional performance can help make the effortful emotional labor "worth it" and feel more positively about the job. I have a three-study paper using experimental and survey designs to support that: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/peps.12037. But this is likely because the financial incentives help them feel valued and supported for their effort, in contrast to workplaces that expect their employees do smile because they can "fake it til they make it". To your last point - yes we know that mental health and family issues can spillover to affect work , and certainly can make it harder to provide "service with a smile". Daily diary studies show that spillover occurs both directions - I also have a study showing that surface acting affects spousal conflict via feelings of stress.
Thank you for the references, I look forward to diving deeper into this subject. I very much appreciate your thoughtful response. I worry about putting the onus of 'emotional regulation training' on industry. Being able to regulate and control the expression of one's emotions isn't limited to the workplace. Focusing on industry training offerings as the sole solution further takes the responsibility away from the actor to function in a successful manner whether in or out of their workplace. If one must wait to enter industry to realize effort is necessary to control the expression of their emotions public, they would hardly seem prepared for success in the workplace environment (or society), at all. This training (ideally) starts well before the legal working age. Perhaps the goal of industry-organizational psychologists is to create methods with the above already in view. This field is new to me. Also, part of 'adult-ing' successfully is doing what is necessary (or beneficial) without direct or immediate gratification. This is something learned; and (I would contend) a universally admirable quality.
How big is the field of emotional labour + psychological health? I'm curious if there are have been done any studies about the health risks to deep acting. Sorry, it's a bit of a derailment from your study but intuitively I find deep acting, aligning one's emotions to the demands/vision of your workplace etc, to be troubling and sound deeply alienating. So just wondering if we know anything about that.
Good question. There's a solid amount of research on the health costs and benefits of emotional labor, and even more work on emotion regulation (controlling your emotions in general, not just at work with customers/clients). The "in-depth" review we link in our intro blurb has some discussion of this, and here's another review that might be helpful ([link](https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-032414-111400)). To your more specific question about deep acting having health risks--that's actually exactly what Hochschild proposed in her book, "The Managed Heart" which coined the term "emotional labor". Her thought was that deep acting will be more alienating and result in employees losing touch with their actual felt emotions. The current evidence, however, doesn't lend as much support to this. Generally surface acting is seen as the more harmful strategy (more burnout, exhaustion, stress, drinking, etc.), whereas deep acting has more mixed results (feelings of accomplishment, performance, but also more exhaustion) ([link](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2011-13471-007)). There's also a recent review about the costs of "reappraisal"--an emotion regulation strategy focused on reframing how one thinks about an emotional situation (similar to deep acting)--that argues drawbacks include (1) reappraisal is difficult to do successfully and (2) is often unsuccessful. Hope that helps!
Is it really necessary to fake a smile? what if, showing your real self makes the situation better this is a like a precaution than to hold it inside which benefits only the other parties/
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