The Promise of Emotion Practice: At the Bedside and Beyond

Abstract

Emotion scholars have documented the relevance of emotional labor for understanding exhaustion, burnout, and other negative outcomes among workers in care-based occupations. Yet, an emotion management framework that centers emotional labor is not without limitations. The authors use audio diary data from 48 acute care hospital nurses to illustrate how an emotion practice approach can empirically capture complex emotional processes beneath and beyond individual acts of emotional labor. This analysis highlights the interplay of context and self in shaping the occupational outcomes of care workers and illustrates how emotions are simultaneously conscious and embodied, dynamic and structured, individual and collective.