Emotion regulation in hospital employees

Do service workers regulate their emotions so that they are in line with their job requirements? What effects do such regulation processes have on workers’ psychophysical well-being? What variables mediate their frequency, nature, and effects? To study these issues, Italian men and women (N=180), working as nurses, doctors, or in other technical roles, at a hospital were administered a questionnaire comprising several scales, plus questions on socio-demographic and work-related variables. Results showed that the regulation of felt emotions, i.e., “Emotional labor” (Hochschild 1983), is a relevant variable of such jobs. Workers performed both (a) surface acting, i.e., vis-a-vis a patient expressed only contextually appropriate emotions (e.g., by smiling to an annoying patient), and (b) deep acting, i.e., tried to actually feel the required emotion; (c) feeling genuine emotions (or emotional consonance), i.e., effortlessly feeling the job-required emotions, was a frequent experience too for employees. Furthermore, results showed that the nature and frequency of such regulation processes have significant relations with both objective job-related features, such as the type of hospital ward to which the worker is associated, and with psychological variables such as burnout, hedonic tone of felt emotions, and overall life satisfaction.