Turning Frowns (and Smiles) Upside Down: A Multilevel Examination of Surface Acting Positive and Negative Emotions on Well-Being

• Published in: Journal of applied psychology Vol. 104; no. 9; pp. 1164 - 1180
• Main Authors: Lennard, Anna C., Scott, Brent A., Johnson, Russell E.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States American Psychological Association 01-09-2019
• Subjects: Acting; Adult; Affective Valence; Deception; Ecological Momentary Assessment; Emotional labor; Emotions; Facial expressions; Faking; Fatigue; Female; Frowns; Hedonism; Human; Humans; Job Satisfaction; Male; Management Personnel; Middle Aged; Multilevel Analysis; Negative Emotions; Personal Satisfaction; Positive Emotions; Quality of service; Sampling; Social Behavior; Test Construction; Well Being; experience sampling; well-being; surface acting; emotional labor
• ISSN: 0021-9010; 1939-1854
• DOI: 10.1037/apl0000400

The consensus in the emotional labor literature is that surface acting is "bad" for employees. However, the evidence on which this consensus is based has been derived from contexts emphasizing the display of positive emotions, such as customer service. Despite the acknowledgment that many contexts also require the display of negative emotions, scholarly work has proceeded under the assumption that surface acting is harmful regardless of the valence of the emotion being displayed. In this study, we take a hedonic approach to well-being and challenge the consensus that surface acting is bad for employees by examining its effects on changes in emotional exhaustion and job satisfaction, through changes in positive and negative affect, for both positive and negative emotional displays. Using a within-person approach, we focus on managers, whose occupation calls for displays of both positive and negative emotions. Our 3-week, experience-sampling study of 79 managers revealed that faking positive emotions decreases positive affect, which harms well-being more than authentically displaying such emotions. In contrast and counter to what the extant literature would suggest, faking negative emotions decreases negative affect and increases positive affect, which benefits well-being more than authentically displaying such emotions. We further integrate construal level theory with hedonic approaches of emotion to identify trait construal level as an important boundary condition to explain for whom surface acting is harmful versus beneficial.