The Emozional Work of Volunteers in Emergencies. A Qualitative Study During the Abruzzo Earthquake

Emotional labor refers to the process by which workers and volunteers are expected to manage their feelings in accordance with organizationally defined rules and guidelines. Hochschild's (1983) The Managed Heart introduced this concept and inspired the research on this topic. The scientific literature on emotional labor can be divided into two major streams of research: the first uses emotional labor as a vehicle to understand the organization, structure, and socia relations of service jobs; the second focuses on individuals' efforts to express and regulate emotion and the consequences of those efforts (Wharton, 2009). This second focus traces an analogy with the concept of cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957), suggesting that the psychological effort required by emotional work can generate an “emotional dissonance”. Workers and volunteers forced to show incongruent emotions with their own feelings, in the course of time can experience a subjective sense of extraneousness or distress, capable of prejudicing their psychological well-being. The quantitative research related to the consequences of the emotional fatigue of workers and volunteers paid attention above all to burnout (Maslach, 1982). In this sphere of research the idea prevails of an increase in fatigue which in time annihilates the person, victim of too much interaction; a suffering that is measured with a diagnosis of “psychological state” (Zamperini, 2007). A qualitative approach however enables the analysis of forces and fatigue in handling emotions during interaction (a “psychological process”), and not simply the quantitative outcome of too much interaction.