The way we experience an emotion is obviously not always the same as the way we show it. To analyze emotional labor, we divide emotions into felt or displayed emotions.41 Felt emotions are our actual emotions. In contrast, displayed emotions are those the organization requires workers to show and considers appropriate in a given job. They’re not innate; they’re learned, and they may or may not coincide with felt emotions. For instance, research suggests that in U.S. workplaces, it is expected that employees should typically display positive emotions like happiness and excitement, and suppress negative emotions like fear, anger, disgust, and contempt.42

Displaying fake emotions requires us to suppress real ones. Surface acting is hiding inner feelings and emotional expressions in response to display rules. Surface acting is literally “putting on a face” of appropriate response to a given situation, like smiling at a customer when you don’t feel like it. Surface acting on a daily basis can also lead to emotional exhaustion at home, work-family conflict, and insomnia.43 In the workplace, daily surface acting leads to exhaustion, fewer OCBs,44 increased stress, and decreased job satisfaction.45 Perhaps due to the costs of creatively expressing what we don’t feel, individuals who vary their surface-acting responses may have lower job satisfaction and higher levels of work withdrawal than those who consistently give the same responses.46 Employees who engage in surface displays should be given a chance to relax and recharge. For example, a study that looked at how cheerleading instructors spent their breaks from teaching found those who used the time to rest and relax were more effective after their breaks than those who did chores during their breaks.47

Deep acting is trying to modify our true inner feelings based on display rules. Surface acting deals with displayed emotions, and deep acting deals with felt emotions. Deep acting is less psychologically costly than surface acting because we are actually trying to experience the emotion, so we experience less emotional exhaustion. In the workplace, deep acting can have a positive impact. For example, one study in the Netherlands and Germany found that individuals in service jobs earned significantly more direct pay (tips) after they received training in deep acting.48 Deep acting has a positive relationship with job satisfaction and job performance.49 Employees who can depersonalize or standardize their work interactions that require emotional labor may be able to successfully carry on their acting while thinking of other tasks, thus bypassing the emotional impact.50

When employees have to project one emotion while feeling another, this disparity is called emotional dissonance. Bottled-up feelings of frustration, anger, and resentment can lead to emotional exhaustion. Long-term emotional dissonance is a predictor for job burnout, declines in job performance, and lower job satisfaction.51

It is important to counteract the effects of emotional labor and emotional dissonance. Research in the Netherlands and Belgium indicates that while surface acting was stressful to employees, mindfulness—objectively and deliberately evaluating our emotional situation in the moment—was negatively correlated with emotional exhaustion and positively affected job satisfaction.52 When people become non-judgmentally aware of the emotions they are experiencing, they are better able to look at situations more clearly. Mindfulness has been shown to increase the ability to shape our behavioral responses to emotions.53

The concepts within emotional labor make intuitive and organizational sense. Affective events theory, discussed next, fits a job’s emotional labor requirements into a construct with implications for work events, emotional reactions, job satisfaction, and job performance.