Abstract
People doing emotional labor need to suppress their feelings as a part of their job. As a result, they suffer from persistent work stress. We examined if writing disclosure about secondary emotions by using cell phone text messages is an effective intervention against the stresses of emotional labor. Participants who engaged in interpersonal work were randomized to the following groups: (a) experimental condition consisting of participants who wrote about secondary emotions for three consecutive weeks (N=6), (b) control-writing condition consisting of participants who recorded their daily life activities, such as sleeping time for three consecutive weeks (N=6), and (c) no-writing condition (N=8) consisting of participants that only responded to a questionnaire. Changes in emotional dissonance, burnout, frequency of recalling the job, and secondary emotions were assessed on three occasions. Results of ANOVAs indicated that participants in the experimental condition had a significant reduction in all variables except secondary emotions at follow-up. These results indicate that written disclosures about secondary emotions may restrain the progression of burnout in emotional laborers.
