Emotional labor, or the work that goes into expressing something we don’t genuinely feel, is one of sociology’s central concepts. It was first introduced in 1979 by Arlie Russell Hochschild, whose book the Managed Heart argued that, being all smiles when we’re sad, or pretending to care when we’re indifferent, does little good for our psychological well-being.
Since Hochschild coined the concept, researchers have frequently used emotional labor as a framework to analyze topics such as the stresses of the service industry. Recent studies, though, are more concerned with the nuances of emotional labor itself: how far it reaches, and how it works depending on the personal doing the emotional work. Here are five studies that give a fuller picture of the price of emotional labor.
[For more of this story, written by Angela Chen, go to http://www.psmag.com/health-an...e-of-emotional-labor]
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