Emotional labor refers to the work involved in managing one’s own emotions and expressions when interacting with others, especially when serving customers or clients.
It often means hiding frustration to stay calm and pleasant. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild introduced the term in 1983 for paid jobs where showing the right feeling is part of the work.
When the same effort is unpaid, as in families and friendships, it is called emotion work.
Emotional labor was first studied in relation to the workplace. It now also describes the unpaid, often invisible work of meeting others’ needs, whether at work, in social settings or at home.
When someone engages in emotional labor, they can regulate their emotions to ensure that others feel more comfortable. People shape and direct their own feelings, but social structures and institutions set the expectations they are working to meet.
Key Takeaways
- Definition: Emotional labor is managing the feelings you show, and sometimes feel, as a required part of a paid job (Hochschild, 1983).
- Emotion Work: The same effort made privately, as in families and friendships, is emotion work. Most everyday talk of ‘emotional labor’ describes this.
- Acting Strategies: Surface acting changes only the display. Deep acting tries to change the feeling itself.
- Display Rules: Organizations can only observe what workers show, not what they feel, so researchers prefer ‘display rules’ to ‘feeling rules.’
- Wellbeing Costs: Surface acting and emotional dissonance are linked to exhaustion, depression and anxiety. Deep acting shows weak or no such link on average.
- Uneven Burden: Women are expected to do more emotional labor, at work and at home. Evidence that they are harmed more by a given amount is weaker.
- Evidence Caveat: Most studies are correlational and self-reported. Deep acting can backfire when the required emotions are painful.
Emotional labor examples
Below are some examples of where individuals may use emotional labor:
In service workers
Emotional labor was initially defined as workers managing their feelings according to organizational rules and guidelines (Hochschild, 1983).
Service workers face it most often. For many, it is simply part of the job.
‘Service with a smile’ is perhaps the most common form of emotional labor, where service workers act friendly towards customers and clients (Pugh, 2001).
Service jobs generally require workers to express pleasant, positive emotions that many people enjoy experiencing from others.
If the workplace is unpleasant or customers are rude, it may mean that workers must still put in the emotional labor to please others.
In healthcare and medicine
Emotional labor is also performed in healthcare and caring work. Workers there are expected to show sympathy (Humphrey et al., 2008) and to anticipate and respond to the needs of others.
Medical students often learn emotional detachment to manage their emotional reactions to patients (Smith & Kleinman, 1989).
This hidden curriculum for the students enables them to establish their professional authority.
In leadership
Individuals in management or other leadership roles may have to use emotional labor to influence their followers’ moods, emotions, motivation and performance (Humphrey et al., 2008).
For example, leaders may have to express optimism even when faced with a crisis so that their employees do not panic.
Reviews of the field suggest that emotional labor strategies can also improve leadership effectiveness (Humphrey et al., 2015).
In platform and gig work
The same demands now arrive through apps. Liu and Huang (2025) studied 47 women rural migrant housecleaners who worked through platforms in Shanghai.
Algorithmic management, customer ratings and the character of urban households shaped how much emotional labor the work needed and what form it took. These included apology rituals and strategies for managing the risk of sexual harassment.
Here, part of the audience is a rating system. Workers have fewer chances to push back. The authors argued that emotional labor in the gig economy is a situated social practice, shaped by algorithmic control, class, gender, age and language.
In family life
Emotional labor may be less visible in the family, but it helps ensure that partners and children are happy and emotionally cared for.
In families, one person may be expected to handle childcare and the children’s needs, remember appointments, remind others and start conversations about emotional topics. Researchers call the invisible cognitive and emotional side of this work the mental load (Dean et al., 2021).
What is the theory behind emotional labor?
Hochschild’s Managed Heart
Arlie Hochschild is credited with coining the term ‘emotional labor’ in her 1983 book The Managed Heart. Her timing mattered. Her analysis grew out of an increasingly service-based economy in which more jobs involved direct contact with the public.
She introduced the concept to describe how workers are expected to manage their feelings by rules and guidelines imposed upon them.
Hochschild (1983) studied flight attendants and bill collectors. Their jobs sat at opposite ends of an emotional spectrum.
Flight attendants were instructed to be friendly, helpful and smiling towards passengers, however demanding the passengers were. Even in a bad mood, they had to appear pleasant.
Bill collectors had the opposite task. They were encouraged to show anger and make threats, hoping to wear down a debtor’s resistance.
In both jobs the display was sold. Hochschild called this the commercialization of feeling. She carried the idea of alienation in paid work from the worker’s hands to the worker’s feelings.
- Aim: To understand how the commercialization of feeling changes the experience of work, using two jobs with opposite emotional demands.
- Method: Fieldwork on two groups of public-contact workers: flight attendants, who produced comfort and warmth, and bill collectors, who produced pressure on debtors.
- Results: Workers in both jobs had to induce or suppress feelings to create a required state in others. Hochschild described emotional dissonance and a risk of estrangement from one’s own feelings.
- Conclusion: Feeling can be commodified, and when it is, employers’ rules reach into workers’ inner lives.
The study’s value is conceptual: it supplied the vocabulary that later research still uses. But it rests on fieldwork in two occupations at one time and place.
Bolton and Boyd (2003) later argued that airline cabin crews were skilled emotion managers who could resist and modify the demands of management and customers.
Emotional labor vs emotion work
Emotion management is the broad term for efforts to shape what one feels or shows.
In private life, these efforts follow cultural and social norms about what is appropriate to feel and express, but other people do not directly regulate them.
Hochschild kept two terms apart (Hochschild, 1979, 1983). Emotion work is the private version. Emotional labor moves the same effort into the public world of work, where it is paid for and governed by an employer’s rules (Wharton, 2009).
Her 1979 article argued that people try to manage their feelings against shared expectations about what they ought to feel. People are expected to feel elated at a wedding and sad at a funeral. When they do not, they work on themselves (Hochschild, 1979).
The idea built on Goffman’s account of performance and impression management. Hochschild asked what happens when a job also demands that workers manage the feeling behind the display.
Feeling rules and display rules
Hochschild (1983) argued that organizations commercialize employees’ feelings by requiring them to display emotions as part of their work duties.
Feeling rules are shared expectations about what feeling is appropriate. We can detect them by noticing how we judge our own feelings and how others react to our display (Hochschild, 1983).
Organizations write their own versions, setting the type and amount of emotion workers should show.
According to Hochschild (1983), organizations use feeling rules to try to control employees’ inner lives, the thoughts and feelings that are usually private and personal.
Service jobs depend on workers managing their emotions. So organizations have tried to control the process, making emotional labor a formal job requirement.
Later, researchers argued that ‘display rules’ is the better term than ‘feeling rules.’ Organizations cannot directly regulate employees’ private emotional states, only their outward displays of emotion (Ashforth & Humphrey, 1993).
The distinction matters. Employers rarely specify an inner state. They specify a display: greet every customer, smile, use the customer’s name and never show irritation.
‘Display rules’ captures this focus on outward expression rather than inner states.
Who does emotional labor?
Hochschild (1983) suggested that jobs requiring more emotional labor are performed disproportionately by women.
These jobs create feelings of well-being or affirmation in others. Such responsibilities are usually assigned to women.
They include service work, hospitality and healthcare. These draw on abilities women are thought to use in the private sphere (Abbott et al., 2006).
Frontline service workers were the initial focus of research into emotional labor. As research has gradually expanded, it has also included interactive work, including professional interactions with clients and co-workers.
Research then moved into caring and family work.
Any job that involves interactions with others is thought to require emotional labor to some degree. This has also been examined in other aspects of the work, such as considering the workers’ power dynamics, status, and gender (Wharton, 2009).
Types of emotional labor
Hochschild (1983) described two ways employees alter their emotional expressions at work: surface acting and deep acting.
Surface acting means changing the outward display without changing the feeling underneath. Deep acting means trying to feel the emotion you are expected to show. Both help workers regulate emotions to meet work demands.
| Surface acting | Deep acting | |
|---|---|---|
| What changes | The outward display | The felt emotion itself |
| Effort | Little time or mental effort | More preparation: redirecting attention, reframing, recalling real memories |
| Example | Faking a smile for a demanding customer | A nurse reframing a patient’s irritability as fear |
| Typical cost | The gap between feeling and display must be held open | Weak or no link to impaired wellbeing on average |
Surface acting
Surface acting focuses on public displays of emotional expression. This is when workers change their outward emotional expressions but do not attempt to feel the emotions that they are displaying (Humphrey et al., 2008).
An individual may present emotional expressions on the surface that do not correspond with how they are feeling on the inside.
A common example is a service worker faking a smile. The customer may be demanding, or the worker may be in a bad mood.
While they may not feel like smiling, they will often do so to make the customer feel more comfortable or pleasant.
Surface acting takes little time or mental effort. It needs no inner change. The cost is that the gap between feeling and display stays open for as long as the encounter lasts.
Deep acting
Emotional labor involving deep acting is an effort to truly feel the emotions one is expected to display (Wharton, 2009). This goes a step further than showing surface-level emotional expressions.
Instead, individuals attempt to change their privately felt emotions so that they can actually feel what they want to display.
Take a nurse with an irritable patient. She reminds herself that the irritability may be fear, and her own irritation eases. That is deep acting.
Emotions involve physiological arousal and cognitions, so deep acting modifies these through various techniques (Brotheridge & Grandey, 2002). They may purposely engage in thoughts and activities that help foster these emotions.
Alternatively, they may use trained imagination, where they actively recall past events and experience the emotion they want to portray (Humphrey et al., 2015).
Genuine emotion and a worked example
Ashforth and Humphrey (1993) added a third route. Sometimes the worker already feels the required emotion. Then no acting is needed.
A carer who feels real compassion for a distressed patient meets the display rule without effort. Reviews argue that this genuine emotional labor is used often and can benefit both employees and customers (Humphrey et al., 2015).
Consider a call-centre worker at the end of a ten-hour shift, after four abusive calls. Her script demands warmth and patience. She has three ways to respond:
- Surface acting: She speaks in a pleasant voice while thinking only of the shift ending.
- Deep acting: She reminds herself that this caller has been on hold for an hour and is probably frightened about a missing payment. Her irritation softens into real concern.
- Genuine emotion: The day has gone well, so she is simply in a good mood when the next call arrives.
All three can occur within one hour of the same shift. That is why modern researchers study them as momentary strategies, not fixed traits.
Emotional labor in families
Who does emotional work in families?
Women often enact the emotional labor of managing their own emotions in their families.
Like the workplace, the family can be a distinct and emotionally draining ‘client.’ One person often makes sure everyone is emotionally and physically catered to and supported (Dean et al., 2021).
In a typical nuclear family, women are thought to become responsible for much of the emotional labor by default. They shape and manage the family’s feelings (Hochschild, 1983).
In their heterosexual relationships, women often manage household tasks. They may prompt their partner to act, remind him of important dates, and organize gifts and social events on his behalf.
All these tasks are said to be emotional labor since they involve emotionally and physically supporting someone else.
Mothers in the nuclear family unit often catalog, remember, think about, and do the emotional work of the whole family (Bass, 2015; Wong, 2017).
Fathers do this labor too. But caring for children’s needs is considered a central expectation of motherhood, and a more intense one than fatherhood (Dean et al., 2021).
Survey evidence adds a nuance. In a study of 335 employed, married parents, Erickson (2005) found that gender construction, not sex, predicted who did emotion work. The way people built gendered identities tracked who looked after the family’s feelings.
The mental load
Dean et al. (2021) proposed that the mental load combines cognitive and emotional labor. They described it as:
- Invisible: It is enacted internally, yet it results in unpaid physical labor.
- Boundaryless: It is carried into work, leisure and sleep.
- Enduring: It is never finished, because it is tied to the care of loved ones.
Since the family can be composed of multiple individuals with unique personalities, demands, and needs, the mental load is varied and complex.
Often, mothers are expected to have open-ended time to meet the family’s unexpected needs, adding additional layers to the emotional labor load (Dean et al., 2021).
Daminger (2019) held 70 interviews with 35 couples. She argued that household management is better understood as cognitive labor: anticipating needs, identifying options, making decisions and monitoring progress.
Women did more of it overall, and especially more of the anticipating and monitoring. Decision-making, the component most linked to power, was roughly equal.
A study of 322 mothers found the same pattern. The mothers had young children. Cognitive labor was divided more unequally than physical labor. It was associated with depression, stress and burnout (Aviv et al., 2025).
The study used self-report from one sample, so it shows association, not cause.
Mothers often do emotional labor for their families while at their paid work.
More women have entered the workforce. Men’s domestic labor has not risen substantially, so women remain the primary caregivers regardless of their work commitments (Dean et al., 2021).
Family emotional labor is enduring. It is tied to the care of loved ones, so women cannot opt out of constantly monitoring others’ emotional well-being (Hochschild, 2012).
Even for older children, mothers are expected to ‘safeguard’ their futures. That includes enriching their children’s options for future employment and ensuring they are safe (Milkie & Warner, 2014).
Positive and negative consequences of emotional labor
When considering emotional labor in the workplace, research has found positive and negative consequences associated with this.
Emotional dissonance and exhaustion
Hochschild (1983) suggested that emotional labor can induce what she called ‘emotional dissonance.’ This is the tension workers feel when required to display emotions that do not match their true feelings.
Over time, she said, this might lead to distress and identity-related problems that affect psychological well-being.
She called the extreme version estrangement. Workers feel cut off from their own emotions.
Numerous studies link this to emotional exhaustion. Workers who regularly display emotions that conflict with their own feelings are more likely than others to feel drained and used up by work.
Surface acting at work, such as faking or suppressing emotions, is related to workers’ levels of emotional exhaustion (Van Dijk & Brown, 2006; Glomb & Tews, 2004).
Surface acting is also linked to a lower sense of personal accomplishment (Brotheridge & Grandey, 2002). It goes with more feelings of depersonalization too, a cynical, detached way of treating the people one serves.
Emotional dissonance has also been linked to emotional exhaustion (Morris & Feldman, 1997). Which feeling is hidden matters.
Erickson and Ritter (2001) found that managing feelings of agitation increased burnout and inauthenticity. These effects did not differ by gender.
Caregiving jobs involve a great deal of emotional labor. They are emotionally demanding and often performed in unequal relationships, in which the recipient’s needs are met and the carer’s are disadvantaged (Wharton, 2009).
However, not all caregiving jobs are exploitative in this way. Providing care to others may be experienced as emotionally satisfying and intrinsically rewarding for many people.
Surface acting vs deep acting outcomes
The research points to a clear split between the two strategies. Grandey (2003) found that coworkers rated service delivery as poorer when employees used surface acting and better when they used deep acting. Surface acting, but not deep acting, was related to stress.
Deep acting, by contrast, went with a greater sense of personal accomplishment (Brotheridge & Grandey, 2002).
A meta-analysis of three decades of research confirms the pattern.
- Aim: To quantify how emotion-rule dissonance, surface acting and deep acting relate to wellbeing, job attitudes and performance.
- Method: A meta-analysis of 494 correlations from 95 independent studies.
- Results: Surface acting and dissonance had substantial links to impaired wellbeing (ρ = .39 to .48) and poorer job attitudes. Deep acting had weak wellbeing links but positive links to emotional performance and customer satisfaction.
- Conclusion: Faking and dissonance are costly while deep acting is not, and the costs run partly through surface acting.
Most of the input studies were observational, so the correlations show association, not cause. A ρ of .39 to .48 means roughly 15 to 23 per cent shared variance. That is substantial for organizational research. But most variation in wellbeing remains unexplained.
Deep acting has also been shown to positively relate to job satisfaction, organizational commitment, job performance, and customer satisfaction (Humphrey et al., 2015).
Customers and performance
Employees are not the only audience.
Pugh (2001) found that employees’ positive displays were linked to customers’ positive mood after the encounter. They were also linked to higher ratings of service quality, consistent with emotional contagion.
Authenticity matters too. Grandey et al. (2005a) found that authentic displays raised perceived friendliness, but only affected overall satisfaction when the task was well performed. Fake friendliness is a partial substitute for good service at best.
Does smiling raise sales? Not necessarily.
Sutton and Rafaeli (1988) studied 576 convenience stores and expected displays of pleasant emotion to predict sales. They found the opposite: a negative relationship.
A follow-up qualitative study suggested that busyness explained it. Clerks in rapidly paced, high-sales stores with long lines showed less positive feeling than clerks in slow stores.
Smiling and sales were linked through a third factor, not through each other.
What shapes the effects of emotional labor?
Generally, workers’ emotional regulation strategies seem to have the most significant effect on how emotional labor affects their well-being.
If workers genuinely feel the emotions they are expected to display, they seem better able to resist negative consequences.
Likewise, happier workers are less likely to need to put on an act with customers (Wharton, 2009).
Control matters too. Grandey et al. (2005b) surveyed 196 customer-contact employees in the United States and France. High job autonomy buffered the link between faking or suppressing expressions and emotional exhaustion.
The effects may depend on three things. These are enjoyment of the job, how pleasant the workplace is, and a worker’s ability to regulate emotions in healthy ways.
Reducing the costs of emotional labor
If the cost depends on dissonance and control, organizations can reduce harm. Four ideas follow from the research:
- Job Design: Limit rigid scripts and give workers autonomy in how they meet service goals.
- Display Rules: Grandey, Rupp and Brice (2015) reviewed evidence that requiring positive emotions induces dissonance and depletes resources. They proposed abandoning formal display rules, a proposal not yet tested.
- Households: Dean et al. (2021) proposed measuring the mental load in health and social surveys and treating caregiving as vital infrastructure. Whether this reduces the load is untested.
- Individuals: Faking at length is draining, and attention or reappraisal can shift an emotion. Stress management and recovery help, but they do not replace better working conditions.
The ethical question stays open: is it legitimate for an employer to buy a worker’s expression of feeling? The evidence supports caution about requiring dissonant display, not a blanket prohibition on emotionally skilled work.
Critical evaluation
Hochschild’s concept has driven decades of research. Recent evidence refines it. Both its theory and its evidence still have limits.
Contemporary Research
Recent evidence still points to a split between surface and deep acting. But the split is not universal.
Reviews describe a field that has moved on. The question is no longer whether emotional labor is costly. It is which conditions make it costly (Grandey & Gabriel, 2015; Grandey & Melloy, 2017). Organizational structure and the type of emotion both matter.
Surface acting, deep acting and mental health
The most recent meta-analysis pooled the evidence on mental health (Zhao et al., 2025).
- Aim: To synthesize the evidence on how emotional labor relates to mental health, given inconsistent earlier findings.
- Method: A systematic review and meta-analysis of 27 observational studies of workers in several occupations, drawn from six databases.
- Results: Surface acting and dissonance together correlated with negative mental health (r = .213). Surface acting correlated with depression (r = .333); deep acting had no significant overall correlation (r = .047).
- Conclusion: Interventions should target surface acting and dissonance, but the evidence base is limited and heterogeneous.
As a meta-analysis, it sits near the top of the evidence hierarchy. Yet pooling observational studies with inconsistent measures yields associations, not causes.
The effects are modest. An r of .213 corresponds to about 4.5 per cent shared variance. The null result for deep acting means no overall link was detected, which is compatible with harm in specific conditions.
When deep acting backfires
Two recent studies of distressing work complicate the picture.
In a survey of 854 mental health and library workers in Ontario, surface acting worsened both anxiety and anger. Deep acting did not protect mental health, and under high negative display demands it made psychological states worse (Singh et al., 2025).
In an in-depth analysis of debt collectors, clients’ traumas triggered workers’ memories of their own bereavements and violence. The resulting authentic feeling was damaging. The authors concluded that when the required emotions are negative, deep acting and authentic feeling can be more harmful than surface acting (Brooks et al., 2026).
Weighted by design, the meta-analysis carries most weight for the general direction. The survey tests the moderator at scale.
The debt-collection study is a single occupation. It shows why the moderator matters without showing how often deep acting fails.
Workers combine strategies
Gabriel et al. (2015) argued that studying each strategy separately ignores how workers combine them. They used latent profile analysis, which groups people by their pattern of scores, across two studies. Five profiles emerged. They were non-actors, low actors, surface actors, deep actors and ‘regulators.’
The profiles differed in antecedents such as display rules and customer orientation, and they predicted exhaustion, job satisfaction and inauthenticity differently. A worker who uses both strategies is therefore a pattern with its own outcomes, not an exception.
Limits of the theory and evidence
Four limits stand out.
- Ambiguous Concept: Researchers disagree on whether emotional labor means the job requirement, the effort or the display.
- Correlational Evidence: Most studies are cross-sectional surveys, so they cannot show whether acting causes strain.
- Passive Workers: Hochschild’s account may underplay workers’ skill and resistance.
- Unequal Burden: Gender, race and class shape who bears the load, and most evidence comes from a few countries.
Taken together, the evidence supports caution, not rejection. The balance of evidence is that emotional labor is neither inevitably harmful nor harmless.
Harm is greatest where rules are rigid, autonomy is low, the required emotion is far from what is felt, and the audience is abusive.
Most of the strongest quantitative evidence comes from service staff in a handful of countries.
An ambiguous concept
A major review found that Hochschild’s concept has been much less helpful in guiding theory than in generating research (Wharton, 2009). The studies divide into two streams: interactive work, and individuals’ regulation of emotion.
Part of the problem is what the term names.
Hochschild (1983) and the psychology literature (Ashforth & Humphrey, 1993) lean towards different answers on whether it means the job requirement, the effort or the display.
Hochschild kept emotion work and emotional labor apart. Everyday usage blurs them.
Grandey and Gabriel (2015) listed ‘fuzzy construct conceptualizations’ as a roadblock. They named assumed but untested processes and methodological stagnation as further ones. The popular extension to unpaid settings adds to the ambiguity.
For a student, the practical rule is to state which sense a source is using.
Correlational and self-reported evidence
Most evidence comes from cross-sectional surveys. The same workers report both their strategies and their wellbeing, so one person rates both the cause and the outcome.
Meta-analyses show consistent associations (Hülsheger & Schewe, 2011; Zhao et al., 2025). They cannot show whether acting causes strain. Strained workers may also fall back on cheaper strategies.
Studies that add coworker ratings (Grandey, 2003) or customer perceptions (Grandey et al., 2005a) are useful correctives, because they reduce the reliance on self-report.
The 2025 meta-analysis itself calls for longitudinal and experimental designs.
A diary study that tracks one worker’s strategy and strain over days would help, because it shows what comes first. So would a trial that relaxes display rules in some units but not others.
Workers are not passive
Bolton and Boyd (2003) argued that Hochschild’s account under-emphasized skill and resistance. They analyzed comparable data from airline cabin crews and presented them as skilled emotion managers who juggle different types of emotion work according to the situation.
Hoffmann (2016) described members of worker cooperatives who were free to show anger and enthusiasm, emotions that conventional workplaces suppress.
Other emotions still had to be displayed even when insincere. Who sets the rules changes what emotional labor feels like.
Genuine-emotion research points the same way. Many workers value the role (Humphrey et al., 2015).
Gender, race and class: whose labor?
The gendered distribution of emotional labor is well supported at the level of expectations, in workplaces (Hochschild, 1983) and in households (Erickson, 2005; Daminger, 2019).
The evidence that women are harmed more by a given amount is weaker (Erickson & Ritter, 2001).
Racialized feeling rules matter too. In 25 interviews with Black professionals, Wingfield (2010) argued that the right emotional performance carries different implications for Black workers and tends to reinforce racial difference.
Class and migration status matter as well (Liu & Huang, 2025). Intersectional theory develops this theme further.
Studies that treat ‘workers’ as a single group can miss who bears the burden.
Generalizing findings from service work in a few countries to other economies is an assumption.
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How is emotional labor related to emotional contagion?
Emotional labor involves managing emotions to display desired emotions in a work setting, often requiring suppressing genuine feelings and projecting specific emotions.
Emotional contagion is when one person’s emotions trigger similar emotions in others. The two are related in that individuals performing emotional labor, especially in roles requiring frequent interpersonal interactions, can inadvertently spread their suppressed or induced emotions to others through emotional contagion, affecting the emotional tone of the environment.
