The Study That Separated the Two Ways of Managing Emotions at Work

This study set out to formally test something the emotional labour literature had mostly assumed rather than measured directly: does faking an emotion at work and genuinely trying to feel it have different consequences for burnout? Surveying employees across five occupational groups with varying emotional demands, from healthcare to sales, the researchers found that surface acting specifically predicted depersonalisation, a numb, detached way of relating to the people one is meant to be serving, above and beyond how demanding the job itself was. In contrast, both perceiving a demand to display positive emotion and genuinely trying to feel it, deep acting, were associated with a stronger sense of personal accomplishment, a positive outcome rather than a cost.

As a cross-sectional survey, it establishes association at a single point in time rather than tracking how these patterns develop, and self-reported measures of an internal process like 'genuinely trying to feel an emotion' are inherently somewhat imprecise. Its lasting contribution was conceptual clarity: it helped establish, empirically rather than just theoretically, that the emotional cost of 'people work' isn't a single, uniform burden, it depends heavily on whether someone is faking the emotion or actually working to feel it.