Open research questions in Emotional Labor in Professions

What the literature leaves open

• The findings underscore the importance of strengthening emotion regulation competencies among shadow teachers. Educational institutions and inclusive schools are encouraged to provide professional development programs that focus on emotional competence, stress management, mindfulness practices, and psychological well-being. Establishing supportive work environments through peer support, supervision, and access to mental health resources may also help shadow teachers cope more effectively with occupational demands and reduce the risk of prolonged work-related stress.

  The role of emotion regulation in mitigating work stress among shadow teachers in inclusive schools · 2026 · DOI

• Future studies should further investigate how emotion labor associates with other identity dimensions by gender, linguistic background, or contract status in higher education. Comparative studies in other regions of the Global South would indicate whether the emotional labor experienced by university teachers is common to all teachers in that region or specifically shaped by local institutional cultures. Longitudinal research, following teachers over extended academic periods, might reveal how identity develops with sustained emotive stress or support. Bringing student voices into research will help us understand how teacher emotion labor is perceived and how it impacts classroom climate and learning outcomes.

  How Emotion Labor Shapes English Teacher Identity in Underfunded Universities of the Global South: A Case Study of Professional Struggles and Resilience · 2026 · DOI

• This study draws on a dataset of 47 interviews with current and former T&S professionals, and therefore the findings reflect a range of individuals’ lived experiences, motivations, and well-being strategies which may not match those of every person who works in platform-side T&S; however, qualitative research is not intended to be generalizable. Less than half of interviewees had held content moderation or customer service roles. Their perspectives broaden our understanding of the nature of trust and safety work beyond content moderation on social media and at the level of lowest-paid work. However, as the trust and safety ecosystem rapidly evolves, continued attention to the changing conditions of the lowest-paid workers is an important area for research and intervention. Our dataset includes limited representation from T&S professionals in the Majority World; further work is needed to examine the commonalities and disparities in their experiences. Similarly, shifts in the T&S ecosystem related to mitigating and utilizing generative AI are not reflected, as our interviews concluded in Summer 2024. The impact of these shifts on the day-to-day work and application of affective-relational skills deserves attention. Finally, a more in-depth study of these affective-relational skills, how they are applied, and how T&S professionals achieve and maintain the “desired state of mind” could be used to develop comprehensive, holistic well-being initiatives for the field.

  “I Tend to Run to Problems That People Run Away From” · 2026 · DOI

• Finally, further research is needed to clarify the mechanisms through which self-demand may undermine the buffering role of engagement, and to examine whether job crafting functions as a genuine resource-building strategy or, in some contexts, as an effortful means of maintaining outward functionality.

  Silent Emotional Exhaustion in Service Workers: The Hidden Toll of SelfDemand and Emotional Suppression · 2026 · DOI

• and their potential influence on other aspects of organizational behavior. Fourth, the diary design required participants to select an event that had occurred the previous day, which may have introduced an additional selection bias. Although this procedure minimizes retrospective recall, it may nonetheless lead participants to choose more salient or emotionally intense events—potentially those with more negative valence—thereby limiting the representativeness of the full spectrum of everyday workplace experiences. Future research could address this issue by incorporating random event prompts or by collecting multiple events per day to better capture typical, less emotionally charged episodes.

  It’s not Just Business: Frequency and Intensity of Basic Emotions at Work and Triggered Events · 2026 · DOI

• Focusing on India’s high-demand and globally significant IT sector also adds value by addressing a context that has been relatively underexplored in resilience research, thereby enhancing the cross- cultural relevance of existing theories.

  Happiness at Work: A Shield Against Toxicity · 2026 · DOI

• While our findings offer important insights, several limitations should be acknowledged. First, despite employing a longitudinal design and uncovering the simultaneous effects of exposure on compassion and empathy for suffering, the two-wave structure captures only between-person effects, thereby limiting conclusions about intra-individual dynamics (Hamaker et al., 2015). A random intercept cross-lagged panel model, which requires at least three waves of data, would be necessary to distinguish between- and within-person effects more clearly. In doing this, future research could test both pathways within a model. Second, attrition bias (Goodman & Blum, 1996) may have influenced our findings, as significant differences emerged between completers and dropouts. However, we applied full-information maximum likelihood (FIML) estimation with time pressure as an auxiliary variable to minimize estimation bias (Collins et al., 2001; Enders, 2022), and comparisons between the full sample and completers revealed no substantial differences, suggesting limited evidence for serious attrition bias. Nevertheless, future studies should adopt strategies to further reduce attrition, such as personalized reminders or incentives where feasible. Third, our sample consisted exclusively of German police officers, which raises questions about generalizability of the findings. Future research should seek to replicate these results in different cultural contexts and among other human service professionals, such as caregivers, pastoral workers or physicians. Finally, the use of self-report measures introduces the potential risk of a common method bias (Podsakoff et al., 2003). While steps such as anonymous participation and the use of autoregressive models help mitigate this risk (Dwyer, 1983; Zapf et al., 1996), future studies would benefit from including objective indicators—such as neurophysiological measures (e.g., Dor-Ziderman et al., 2021)—to strengthen the validity of causal interpretations.

  Empathy for Suffering, Compassion, and Emotional Distancing in Police Work: A Longitudinal Cross-Lagged Study on Dual Pathways to Well-Being · 2026 · DOI

• There are still some limitations of this study. First, this study used a cross- sectional design with single‑source self‑reported data, which may carry common method variance. Although Harman’s single-factor test showed the first factor accounted for only 34.71% of variance, indicating no severe CMV concern, Harman’s test alone is a relatively weak diagnostic for ARTICLE IN PRESS ARTICLE IN PRESS ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT common method bias. Future studies are encouraged to adopt more rigorous approaches such as marker variables or temporal separation to further control for CMV. Second, this study adopted whole-cluster random sampling to select a partial sample from Hunan Province, China, which may not be representative of all medical workers in mainland China, thus limiting the generalizability of the findings. Future multi-center studies should be conducted to address this limitation. In this study, the Turnover Intention Scale used was reduced to two items from three after PLS-SEM analysis, with a Cronbach’s α value of 0.65. Although this value meets the acceptable threshold for reliability, it also suggests room for improvement in the scale’s internal consistency. This scale is widely accepted by researchers as an authoritative measure of the strength of turnover intention among Chinese medical workers. It is selected due to its feasibility for data collection and the consideration of reducing the participation time of participants. However, we acknowledge that the limited number of items may restrict the scale’s ability to capture the multidimensional characteristics of TI. We recommend that future studies employ more comprehensive and widely used turnover intention scales to improve measurement precision and enable replicable results. Further research can be carried out in the following areas in the future. First, as most studies currently use cross-sectional surveys, longitudinal studies can be conducted in the future to track changes in medical workers’ turnover intention over different periods and to explore the dynamic ARTICLE IN PRESS ARTICLE IN PRESS ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT trajectories between different variables. Second, medical workers’ sense of meaning in life and professional happiness may be affected by cultural contexts, and future studies can be conducted in different countries to explore the impact and the model applicability in different cultural contexts. Third, qualitative interview studies can be continued on the original basis to more comprehensively understand the intrinsic correlation mechanisms and influence paths among different variables. Finally, in addition to the several variables currently studied, the influence of other potential variables, such as job satisfaction, organizational atmosphere, etc., on turnover intention can be explored, so as to improve the model.

  The relationship between medical workers’ presence of meaning in life and turnover intention: the mediating role of searching for meaning in life and professional happiness · 2026 · DOI

• Future research could address these limitations by employing video-based stimuli, behavioral observation in field set- tings, or immersive virtual reality simulations to more authenti- cally capture the multimodal character of customer emotional expressions and elicit more ecologically valid responses from employees.

  How employees respond to customer anger and sadness: emotional reciprocity and recovery strategies in service failures · 2026 · DOI

• Earlier studies examining psychological contract breaches in the UK's health and social care sector had focused mainly on nurses, therapists, and the residential care sector with only a brief mention of the domiciliary care sector.

  Emotional Intelligence, Trust, Dignity, Psychological Contract, and Staff Performance: An Exploratory Evaluation of UK’s Migrant Domiciliary Care Workers Lived Experience · 2026 · DOI

• Future researchers can focus on how HR practices such as recruitment, training, deployment affect psychological contracts, by drawing from a range of sectors/organization in the UK.

  Emotional Intelligence, Trust, Dignity, Psychological Contract, and Staff Performance: An Exploratory Evaluation of UK’s Migrant Domiciliary Care Workers Lived Experience · 2026 · DOI

• This paper does not seek to measure the psychological contract of the migrant domiciliary care workers by using the psychological inventory as developed by Rousseau (2001) and advanced by Rousseau et al. (2018).

  Emotional Intelligence, Trust, Dignity, Psychological Contract, and Staff Performance: An Exploratory Evaluation of UK’s Migrant Domiciliary Care Workers Lived Experience · 2026 · DOI

• Purpose The emotional labour (EL) of female principals and assistant principals is understudied in Canada, and this study aims to help understand the nature of female school leaders' EL, which could provide insights into reducing compassion fatigue and burnout.

  Unaccounted work of women leaders – the experience and impact of providing emotional labour on women leaders · 2025 · DOI

• This article argues that the limited research on educators’ emotional labour with families and its ensuing invisibility may pertain to both its positioning within social constructivist and interpretivist paradigms that render such work as naturally inherent and to conceptualisations of emotional labour theory that entrench this work in maternalistic discourses.

  Emotional labour while working with families: Potential affordances for supporting early childhood educators’ wellbeing · 2024 · DOI

• Despite a symbolic shift toward ‘emotional taint’ in dirty work literature, the role of the workplace has not been studied in relation to socially admired professions, such as corporate social responsibility (CSR) work.

  When the main job tasks are perceived to be ‘irrelevant’ in the workplace: the internal uselessness of corporate social responsibility work in Japan · 2019 · DOI

• This narrative study investigated identity, agency and emotions, amongst an under-researched academic group – those without PhDs with primary responsibility for teaching, who are also expected to do research.

  Emotionally loaded identity and agency in Finnish academic work · 2018 · DOI

• Finally, we contend that the overrepresentation of women in practitioner positions in IMH leaves an empirical gap where little is known about the experience of male IMH practitioners and the ramifications of their performance of emotional labor.

  IS REFLECTIVE SUPERVISION ENOUGH? AN EXPLORATION OF WORKFORCE PERSPECTIVES · 2018 · DOI

• Contrary to the results of Brief, Burke, George, Robinson, and Webster (1988), NA did not account for much of the variance shared by stressors and affective strains (job satisfaction, anger, and feelings of stress and frustration).

  Negative affectivity as the underlying cause of correlations between stressors and strains. · 1991 · DOI

• Considerable gaps exist in sociological knowledge about emotions; in particular, little is known about distribution of different emotional experiences in the population, the content of emotion culture, emotional socialization processes, emotional interactions, and relationships between social structure and emotion norms.

  The Sociology of Emotions · 1989 · DOI

• created if the ability to participate with un- derstanding is lacking, if objectively judged success is not success in the eyes of the person in question, and if some active need of the EXPEKIENCE, EMOTION, AND VOCATIONAL CHOICE 27 participant is not being met.

  Experience, Emotion, and Vocational Choice¹ · 1948 · DOI

• Research on the relationship between age and emotional labour has yielded conflicting results, suggesting either a positive correlation or no cor- relation at all between deep acting and age (Doerwald et al.

  Do Experience, Age and Marital Status Facilitate Educators to Show Genuine Emotions? Facilitating a Supportive Work Environment · 2026 · DOI

• Originality/value This paper addresses a gap in research on how Ofsted inspections affect higher education staff involved in apprenticeship provision and proposes institutional neglect as a potential lens for understanding passive organisational disengagement during inspection periods.

  Exploring the impact of Ofsted inspections of apprenticeship provision on higher education staff · 2026 · DOI

• Existing literature also suggests that some features may be attributed to criers more quickly than others, although this has not been directly examined.

  A Prototype Analysis of Lay Conceptions of Workplace Criers · 2026 · DOI

• Creative idea withholding constitutes a significant yet insufficiently examined obstacle to organizational innovation, as unexpressed ideas cannot be evaluated or implemented.

  Emotional Culture, Communication Climate, and Creative Idea Withholding: A Curvilinear Perspective · 2026 · DOI

• While individual psychological factors of skin care professionals have been studied, comparative research addressing the cultural and industrial disparities between the two nations remains scarce.

  A Comparative Study on Emotional Intelligence and Self-Efficacy of Korean and Chinese Skin Care Professionals: Differences in Job Stress and Job Commitment · 2026 · DOI

Most-cited papers in Emotional Labor in Professions

• The Sociology of Emotions · Annual Review of Sociology · 1989 · 494 citations
• The Effects of Emotional Ambivalence on Creativity · Academy of Management Journal · 2006 · 357 citations
• Emotional Labor, Burnout, and Inauthenticity: Does Gender Matter? · Social Psychology Quarterly · 2001 · 319 citations
• Emotional labour, burnout and job satisfaction in UK teachers: the role of workplace social support · Educational Psychology · 2011 · 305 citations
• A Meta‐Analytic Structural Model of Dispositonal Affectivity and Emotional Labor · Personnel Psychology · 2012 · 281 citations
• Toward an Understanding of the Development of Ownership Feelings · Journal of Organizational Behavior · 2013 · 208 citations
• Negative affectivity as the underlying cause of correlations between stressors and strains. · Journal of Applied Psychology · 1991 · 198 citations
• Precarious work in the 21st century: A psychological perspective · Journal of Vocational Behavior · 2021 · 194 citations
• “I feel your pain”: A critical review of organizational research on empathy · Journal of Organizational Behavior · 2018 · 176 citations
• Managing the Emotions of Others · Symbolic Interaction · 1996 · 166 citations

Most recent work

• Reckoning With the Ideal Worker Body: A Qualitative Study of Workers in Chronic Pain · Academy of Management Journal · 2026
• The Role of Chinese <scp>EFL</scp> Teachers' Interpersonal Emotion Regulation in Their Work Engagement and Buoyancy: A Sequential Explanatory Mixed‐Methods Research · European Journal of Education · 2026
• The retail ethnoscape framework: cultural embeddedness of (un)welcome · International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management · 2026
• Allowing and Accepting Painful Emotional Experiences · The Journal of Psychodrama Sociometry and Group Psychotherapy · 2026
• The Babylonian Nature of HR: Critical Remarks on the HR Role · Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal · 2026
• Emotional Well-Being in Journalists: Conceptualization, Experiences, and Strategies in the Literature (2010–2025) · Journalism and Media · 2026
• Emotional Intelligence, Trust, Dignity, Psychological Contract, and Staff Performance: An Exploratory Evaluation of UK’s Migrant Domiciliary Care Workers Lived Experience · Scientific Societal & Behavioral Research Journal · 2026
• Designing from within: a theoretical framework for teacher well-being and inclusive belonging in diverse higher education contexts · Information and Learning Sciences · 2026
• A Comparative Study on Emotional Intelligence and Self-Efficacy of Korean and Chinese Skin Care Professionals: Differences in Job Stress and Job Commitment · Journal of the Korean Society of Cosmetology · 2026
• Living Entities Through the Sociological Eye of Emotions. A Research Agenda · The American Sociologist · 2026

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