A Correlational Study of Emotional Labour and Health among Nurses

Emotions are a crucial part of human life. Many a times we need to display different kinds of emotions as a part of our job. As long as the displayed emotions and felt emotions are congruent everything is perfect. However the problem arises when the true inner feeling felt by the person does not match with those displayed by the person as a part of his/her job. A lot of researches have been conducted in the past on nurses along various aspects. However, interestingly not much has been done on the topic of health of the nurses who play a major role in maintaining the health of many people. Also not many researches deal with the concept of emotional labour in nurses, at least as far as India is concerned. The concept of emotional labour itself is a relatively new one and can be applied aptly to the nursing profession. The present study aimed at exploring the relationship between emotional labour and health among nurses. Emotional Labor Scale (Brotheridge&amp;Lee, 1998) and Abhyankar's Health Screening Index (Abhyankar, 2013) were administered to a sample of 82 nurses working in various hospitals in Pune. The obtained data were subjected to Pearson's product moment correlation. Surface acting had a significant positive correlation with health problems (r = .348, p < .01). Deep acting was not correlated with health problems (r = .156, p > .05).