Emotion work

Emotion work, also called emotional labour, involves the management of emotions to bring one's feelings in line with cultural expectations for how one should be feeling. This might involve inducing or suppressing (or doing both at once) a feeling(s) in order to produce the proper state of mind in others.

Emotion work is both done on the self (i.e., managing one's own feelings) and also done by the self on others (i.e., managing and supporting the feelings of others).

Arlie Hochschild (1983) originally coined the concept of emotion work/emotional labour. Hochschild argued that there are "feeling rules" that guide our emotional behaviours. Feeling rules are cultural guidelines for what one should be feeling in any given context.

Erickson emphasizes this latter aspect of emotion work (doing emotion work for and on behalf of others). She defines emotion work as "activities that are concerned with the enhancement of others' emotional well-being and with the provision of emotional support" (Erickson, 2005: 338).

Hochschild, Arlie Russell. (1983). The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.