Emotional Labor
Updated 2026-08-01
INTRODUCTION
English translation pending.
CORE DEFINITION
Emotional labor was introduced by Arlie Hochschild in The Managed Heart, based on her study of flight attendants. It refers to the work of managing feelings and their expression to meet occupational display rules, using two main strategies: surface acting, in which the expression is changed but the feeling is not, and deep acting, in which the worker attempts to actually feel the required emotion. Hochschild argued that the commercialization of feeling alienates workers from their own emotions. The qualification is that cost depends on the strategy and on the intensity and frequency of the demands.
SCAFFOLDING EFFECT
Reduce cognitive load
- Role audit: list the feeling rules your job enforces and note when they bite hardest. - Strategy choice: prefer deep acting over surface acting for recurring interactions. - Recovery planning: schedule short recovery breaks after blocks of intense emotional display.
Anchor fast decisions
Display rules require an internal state and an outward expression to diverge or to be produced on demand. Surface acting maintains that divergence, which requires continuous self-monitoring and suppression, draining regulatory resources and producing a sense of inauthenticity. Deep acting changes the appraisal so the required emotion arises more genuinely, reducing the monitoring burden. When demands are frequent and recovery is absent, the resource drain accumulates into exhaustion.
MINIMUM ACTION
In progress 0/1Practice this model in one real situation:
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Source support: Explicit
- zh.wikipedia.orghttps://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%83%85%E7%B7%92%E5%8B%9E%E5%8B%95verified
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