Feeling rules for professionals: medical students constructing emotional labour in fiction talk

Abstract

Although there is a large body of research about emotional labour in workplace settings, such as the health professions and the service industry, less is known about the empirical processes through which emotional labour is taught in higher education and professional education. Using medical education as an example, a discursive psychological (DP) approach is used in this paper to detail how the feeling rules of the physician’s profession are constructed by students and tutors in fiction, film, and poetry seminars. From a data set of 36 video- and audio-recorded fiction seminars from two medical schools, 29 sequences of discussions about emotional challenges for physicians were found. These examples have been transcribed in detail and analysed using DP. Analysis shows that students and tutors construct feeling rules as fluid, negotiable and changeable. Feeling rules are defined as the calibration of emotion to suit different situations as well as different physicians with different levels of emotionality. Students deploy constructions of feeling rules to manage student identities, and students and tutors construct emotion as a separation between subjective experience and observable behaviours, where the subject-side experience should be managed or controlled in the way it manifests externally.