Emotional Labor Explained: The Hidden Work of Managing Feelings on the Job

A flight attendant’s warmth and a bill collector’s sternness have one thing in common: both are part of what the employer pays for. Emotional labor is the name for that effort, managing your own feelings and the way they show because a paid job requires it. The sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild coined the term in her 1983 book The Managed Heart, which studied exactly those two groups: people paid to seem friendlier, or sterner, than they felt.¹ Since then the phrase has traveled from the airline cabin to the kitchen table, and its meaning has blurred on the way.

Research on the workplace sense of the term has settled one point firmly. Meta-analyses published in 2011 and 2013 agree that faking or hiding feelings on the job goes with more emotional exhaustion, while trying to genuinely feel the expected emotion does not carry the same link.²³ The practical target is the gap between feeling and showing, which can be narrowed from two sides: how you read a hard moment, and the rules that demand the performance. Emotional labor belongs to the wider study of emotional intelligence at work, but it names what a job demands, not a skill a person has.

What emotional labor means: feeling for a wage

In Hochschild’s original sense, emotional labor is feeling management done for a wage, in public-contact jobs where staff are often trained to accept feeling rules and ways of managing emotion that serve the company’s commercial purpose. She kept the plainer term emotion work for the same kind of effort in private life, such as holding back anger or envy with friends and family.¹

Hochschild put it this way in a 2018 interview with The Atlantic.

Emotional labor, as I introduced the term in The Managed Heart, is the work, for which you’re paid, which centrally involves trying to feel the right feeling for the job.

It counts as labor because the feeling is part of what the employer is buying. In the same interview, Hochschild said that while such workers also do physical and mental labor, they are crucially being hired and monitored for their capacity to manage and produce a feeling.⁴

Picture a pharmacy assistant (an invented example) who is told to greet every customer warmly and never argue. When a customer blames her for a price she did not set, the job still asks her to stay pleasant. The effort that takes, on top of ringing up the order, is the emotional labor.

That gives you a quick test for your own role. If you are expected, and in some way judged, on showing a feeling you do not always have, that part of your work is emotional labor. Count it when you weigh how demanding a job is; it rarely appears on a task list.

Surface acting, deep acting and feelings that need no acting

Hochschild described two ways of producing the feeling a job asks for. In surface acting, you manage only the outward expression, such as a smile you do not feel. In deep acting, you try to change the feeling itself, so that what you show becomes genuine.¹

In 2000 the psychologist Alicia Grandey proposed a common frame for this research: one definition that pulled earlier approaches together and treated emotional labor as a form of emotion regulation. Her model also includes individual differences, such as emotional intelligence, and workplace factors, such as supervisor supportsupervisor support: How far employees feel that their manager values their contribution and cares about their wellbeing, usually measured by asking them. In research it is often called perceived supervisor support.Full entry in the glossary.⁵

Seen as emotion regulation, the two strategies differ in timing. Deep acting works early, by changing how you see a situation or where you put your attention. Surface acting works late, by suppressing, amplifying or faking an emotion that has already arrived, so the feeling and the display stay out of step. A third route, naturally felt emotions, covers moments when what you feel already fits what the job asks, so nothing needs regulating; Hülsheger and Schewe noted in 2011 that few studies had examined it.² Whether emotional intelligence makes the early route easier is another matter; research on emotional intelligence and performance in emotionally demanding jobs is a different strand of work.

Take a nurse whose patient snaps at her for the third time in an hour. Surface acting is keeping a calm face while irritation builds underneath. Deep acting is reminding herself that he is frightened and in pain, so that some real patience takes the irritation’s place. The patient sees calm either way; only the first leaves her with a hidden mismatch to manage.

1. Surface acting: you change what you show, not what you feel, so the gap stays open
2. Deep acting: you work on the feeling itself, for example by seeing the situation differently
3. Naturally felt emotion: what you feel already fits the job, so nothing has to be managed

In a hard moment at work, then, ask two questions instead of one: not only how you are coming across, but whether there is a truer reading of the situation that you could feel.

Why faking a feeling is linked to exhaustion

Surface acting is consistently linked to emotional exhaustion, the worn-out feeling researchers measure as one facet of burnout, across studies of workers who deal with customers, patients and clients; deep acting mostly is not. That is the central result of a meta-analysis published by Ute Hülsheger and Anna Schewe in 2011.²

The study

Moderate evidence

Three decades of faking and feeling at work, pooled in one 2011 review

Across 47 studies with nearly 12,000 people, employees who reported more surface acting also reported more emotional exhaustion, a corrected correlation of .44. Deep acting’s link with exhaustion was close to zero and did not hold across studies; in far fewer studies, it went with higher customer satisfaction and better emotional performance.²

The authors call the link between faking and exhaustion strong, and its direction held across studies. The correlationcorrelation: A measure of how closely two things move together, running from minus one, where one rises as the other falls, through zero, meaning no link, to plus one. It says how strong the relationship is, not what causes it, and it is not a percentage.Full entry in the glossary cannot tell you which came first, though: exhausted people may also fake more. The authors point out that the bulk of the evidence came from one-time surveys, and cite an earlier longitudinal study by Hülsheger’s team in which emotional labor predicted later strain, not the reverse.²

A second meta-analysismeta-analysis: A study that combines the results of earlier studies on the same question into one overall estimate. Pooling makes the estimate more precise, but it cannot repair the studies it pools: a meta-analysis of surveys is still survey evidence.Full entry in the glossary, pooling 116 studies, by John Kammeyer-Mueller and colleagues in 2013 found the same pattern. In the authors’ summary, surface acting showed an unfavorable pattern for job satisfaction and for stress and exhaustion, though not for job performance, while deep acting showed a favorable pattern on all three.³

The explanations the researchers offer center on the gap itself. Surface acting means tracking, moment by moment, the distance between what you feel and what you must show, and working without pause to cover it; that sustained effort is thought to drain energy. Faking can also feel inauthentic, which is uncomfortable in its own right. Hülsheger and Schewe note that no study had measured the energy cost directly, so this is a well-reasoned explanation rather than a demonstrated one.² The drain idea also borrows from lab research on ego depletion, and a preregistered 2021 test across 36 laboratories found no clear evidence of that basic effect, though it used lab self-control tasks, not work with customers.⁶

Deep acting is not free either. A 2021 systematic reviewsystematic review: A review that fixes its question and its rules for including studies in advance, then searches out every study that fits and weighs them together. Some systematic reviews pool the results into a meta-analysis; others describe what the studies found without combining the numbers.Full entry in the glossary covering 21 studies of school teachers found surface acting consistently tied to higher self-reported burnout but mixed results for deep acting.⁷ And a 2024 scoping review of 12 studies that surveyed workers repeatedly over their working days concluded that, for the employee, emotional labor brought more harm than benefit, while calling the field young and in need of replication.⁸

Further reading

• 

  The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling

  by Arlie Russell Hochschild

  The study of flight attendants and bill collectors that coined emotional labor and first described surface and deep acting.

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Lowering the cost: four places to start

The evidence points to change at two levels: people can shift some surface acting toward deep acting, or toward situations where they feel what they show, and organizations can reduce how often faking is needed. Hülsheger and Schewe drew both conclusions from their 2011 review, and suggested two starting points: finding which situations trigger surface acting, and giving people more chances to feel genuine positive emotions at work.² Four steps follow; the last is for whoever sets the rules.

1. Map your mask moments. Keep a note for a week of each time you show a feeling you do not have: a certain kind of customer, the last hour of a shift, one recurring meeting. The pattern shows where a different reading might help, and where the situation itself is the problem.
2. Try a different reading before reaching for the mask (our suggestion, based on how deep acting works). For a recurring moment, prepare one honest alternative view in advance, such as “she is angry at the policy, not at me”. If you can partly believe it, you are closer to deep acting; if not, that moment is one to change rather than endure.
3. Test a short daily mindfulness practice. In a 2013 randomized field experimentfield experiment: An experiment run in a real setting, such as a workplace, shop or website, with people going about their ordinary lives, usually with random assignment. It shows how an effect plays out in practice, though often for one setting and one group at a time.Full entry in the glossary in Germany, workers in customer and client-facing jobs who practiced brief mindfulness exercises from a self-training booklet for 10 working days reported less surface acting and less emotional exhaustion than a waitlist group.⁹ Only about a third of those who enrolled ended up in the analysis, partly because people who practiced less than instructed were dropped, and the comparison group did nothing, so expectations may have played a part. It is a habit worth testing, not a treatment for burnout or depression.
4. If you manage people, look at the feeling rules. Grandey and Gordon Sayre’s 2019 review describes deep acting as good for performance and surface acting as costly to well-being, and reviews the work factors that shape that balance.¹⁰ Our own questions are whether staff must smile through abuse, whether they can step away after a hard call, and whether a supervisor back them up when a customer crosses a line?

How a workplace term came to mean housework

In the late 2010s, emotional labor came to mean almost any unseen effort that keeps other people comfortable, above all household planning done mostly by women. Julie Beck’s 2018 article in The Atlantic traced much of the shift to a viral 2017 Harper’s Bazaar essay by Gemma Hartley and her 2018 book, which defined the term as emotion management and life management combined. Hochschild told Beck she was horrified by the stretch, calling many of the new uses an overextension that makes the thinking blurrier. In her view, remembering the chores and reminding others to do them is mental labor. Only the managing of anxiety about forgetting something counts as the emotional part.⁴

Put planning, chores and feeling management under one label and it becomes harder to see which part is wearing someone down, and so harder to change it. Someone whose partner takes over the grocery list is spared the planning; the same person may still spend every family visit bracing against a disapproving relative, the kind of case Hochschild herself counted as emotional labor.⁴

Before trying to share or reduce an invisible load at home or at work, name its parts precisely; that is our reading of the distinction, not a tested method. Planning can be handed to someone else, while feeling management happens inside the person doing it.

Exhaustion that will not lift, and who can help

Exhaustion that does not lift with rest, low mood that lingers, or thoughts of harming yourself deserve a professional’s view, whatever their cause. These routes are drawn from the NHS (UK) and America’s National Institute of Mental Health; the ordering by urgency is ours. For how emotional exhaustion fits into burnout, see burnout as the WHO defines it.

• Right away: for anyone in the US thinking about suicide or in emotional distress, the institute lists 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (phone call or text message), and 911 or a hospital emergency department if a life is threatened.¹¹ On the UK side, the NHS stress page says to ring 999 or get to A&E, with someone else driving, when someone needs help immediately or has seriously harmed themselves, and Samaritans answers on 116 123.¹² Anywhere else, contact local emergency services.
• In the next few days or weeks: the NHS recommends a GP visit when you find stress hard to cope with or what you have tried on your own has not helped, and an urgent GP appointment or a call to NHS 111 when help is needed urgently but the situation is not an emergency.¹² In other countries, see a family doctor.
• At a routine visit: the institute notes that primary care providers can check for mental health problems and point people toward specialist care.¹¹

The bottom line

Hochschild’s term names the part of a paid job that consists of producing a feeling, and it is worth counting as work. The research keeps finding that the draining part is the gap between what you feel and what you show. Where you can, close that gap by seeing a hard moment differently or by changing the rules that force the mask, and treat lasting exhaustion as a reason to get help.