Emotional Labor and Professionalism: Finding Balance at the Local Level

When examining emotions and professionalism, scholars have questioned how these concepts can coexist. Using ten interviews with local administrators, this exploratory study suggests that emotions and professionalism are interrelated—to be professional, an administrator must be skilled in emotional labor. Specifically, professionalism acts as a display rule regulating the emotional behavior of employees. An employee's ability to meet this display rule impacts their individual social capital, along with experiences of emotional contagion from other organizational members. By connecting emotional labor to professionalism, these findings suggest that the emotional competencies of local administrators should receive greater emphasis in professional training programs.

Anger and Sadness Expressions Situated in Both Positive and Negative Contexts: An Investigation in South Korea and the United States

A formidable challenge to the research of non-verbal behavior can be in the assumptions that we sometimes make, and the subsequent questions that arise from those assumptions. In this article, we proceed with an investigation that would have been precluded by the assumption of a 1:1 correspondence between facial expressions and discrete emotional experiences. We investigated two expressions that in the normative sense are considered negative expressions. One expression, “anger” could be described as clenched fists, furrowed brows, tense jaws and lips, the showing of teeth, and flared nostrils, and the other “sadness” could be described as downward turned mouths, tears, drooping eyes, and wrinkled foreheads. Here, we investigated the prevalence, understanding, and use of these expressions in both positive and negative contexts in South Korea and the United States. We found evidence in both cultures, that anger and sadness displays are used to express positive emotions, a notion relevant to Dimorphous Theory. Moreover, we found that anger and sadness expressions communicated appetitive feelings of wanting to “go!” and consummatory feelings of wanting to “pause,” respectively. There were moderations of our effects consistent with past work in Affect Valuation Theory and Display Rule Theory. We discuss our findings, their theoretical relevance, and how the assumptions that are made can narrow the questions that we ask in the field on non-verbal behavior.

Emotion work: an exploratory Study of Experiences Among Family Law Practitioners

Family law practitioners can potentially experience display rule conflict in the workplace. Such conflicts result when family law practitioners comply with competing display rules from their profession, their organisation, and their clients. Research relating to display rule conflict is in its infancy. The phenomenon of display rule conflict was explored to contribute to knowledge in the literature and to inform family law practitioners of such conflicts and how to cope with them. To this end, a hermeneutic phenomenological study was conducted on family law practitioners' workplace experiences of display rule conflict. Two sociocultural theories, professional identity theory and community of coping theory, underpinned this study. Semi-structured interviews of ten family law practitioners comprising partners, solicitors, and paralegals provided data which were analysed by inductive thematic analysis and qualitative hermeneutic phenomenology. Findings revealed four themes: expectations, professional identity, support by offloading, and learning. Furthermore, all participants experienced emotional complexities, tensions and conflicts when they complied with competing expectations to manage and display appropriate emotions during interactions with stakeholders in accordance with diverse formal and informal display rules. Additionally, family law practitioners formed and participated in communities of coping as a means of dealing with display rule conflict. The theme, learning, threaded through the other themes where incidental learning in communities of coping or intended learning in communities of practice were of significant value to participants in this study. It is through learning that family law practitioners were able to recognise expectations from stakeholders and display rule conflicts in various forms and find ways of coping with such conflicts. Time constraints, identity conflict, and power status factors influenced the extent to which knowledge was shared in communities to negotiate the professional identity of the family law practitioners and to uphold perceived power imbalances in the workplace.

Russians Inhibit the Expression of Happiness to Strangers: Testing a Display Rule Model

Cultural stereotypes and considerable psychological research suggest that Russians are less happy and more stoic than Americans and Westerners. However, a second possibility is simply that cultural norms deter Russians from displaying happiness that they actually feel. To test this second possibility, three studies compared the emotional inhibition tendencies in U.S. and Russian student samples. Although Russians and Americans were no different on subjective well-being (SWB), a consistent three-way interaction was found such that Russians (compared with Americans) reported greater inhibition of the expression of happiness (vs. unhappiness), but mainly to strangers (vs. friends/family). Russians also viewed their peers and countrymen as behaving similarly. Furthermore, a consistent interaction was found such that the degree of happiness inhibition with strangers was negatively correlated with SWB in the U.S. samples but was unrelated to SWB in the Russian samples. Given the equivalent levels of SWB observed in these data, we suggest that Russians may not be less happy than Americans, as this would illogically entail that they exaggerate their SWB reports while also claiming to inhibit their expression of happiness. Implications for emotion researchers and international relations are considered.