Emotional Labor Scale

The Emotional Labor Scale measures the effort employees expend managing their feelings to meet the emotional display rules their jobs require, a phenomenon Arlie Hochschild named emotional labor in her 1983 book The Managed Heart. Studying flight attendants and bill collectors, Hochschild showed that organizations sell not only service but also smiles and warmth, and that producing those displays is real, taxing work. Alicia Grandey reframed emotional labor in 2000 as a problem of emotion regulation, distinguishing surface acting (faking or suppressing displays) from deep acting (changing what one actually feels), drawing on Gross's regulation theory. Celeste Brotheridge and Raymond Lee turned these ideas into a validated psychometric instrument, the Emotional Labour Scale, capturing surface acting, deep acting, and the frequency, intensity, variety, and duration of required displays. The construct and its measures anchor a large literature linking emotion regulation at work to burnout and well-being.