When deep acting is damaging: Emotional labour and negative emotions in contemporary debt collection

Emotional labour, the appropriation of workers’ emotions for commercial gain, is central to our understanding of service work. This study focuses on the impact of deep acting, emotional labour and empathy through an in-depth analysis of a hard-to-reach and rarely studied occupation, debt collectors. It details the ways clients’ traumas and emotional demands triggered workers’ memories of their own traumatic life events such as bereavement or violence, prompting authentic feelings/deep acting that was damaging. These observations challenge the existing assumption that surface acting is more harmful than deep acting because surface acting entails faking emotions, creating dissonance between the way workers really feel and the way they are expected to act. Such conclusions have been drawn almost entirely from studies of positive emotions. Significantly, this research demonstrates that, when dealing with negative emotions, deep acting and authentic feeling can be more damaging to workers than surface acting.