Question

Compare and contrast surface acting and deep acting. Provide a concrete example for each.

Answer 1

There are two specific types of emotional labor, and they are called deep acting and surface acting. Deep acting is about a person trying to feel a specific emotion that they are thinking about in their mind. ... Surface acting, however, is when a person has to fake emotion to meet certain social or work rules.

Surface Acting

Surface acting is expressing an emotion without feeling that emotion (Hochschild, 1983). In surface acting or is called as "faking with bad intentions", employees just follow the display norms without altering their inner feeling. On the other word, surface acting is the process to show expected emotions by large degree of control to their external bodily display although the emotions is not actually felt (Alicia, 2003). Employee conforms to the display rules to keep the job and get awards but they are no intention to help customer or hotel.

For example, a hotel front desk employee may put on a smile and cheerfully greet a customer even if she is feeling down. Surface acting then is a discrepancy between felt and displayed emotion.

Indeed, it can be done with "careful presentation of verbal and non-verbal cues as facial expression, gestures and voice tone". Such as, front-line staff will still maintain smiling face to customer although she is deep sorrow at that time due to fulfillment of hotel display rules. In this case, front-line staff only managed her emotion expression to comply display rules without changing her actual state of emotion. Furthermore, if a person used deep acting, she can control her emotion felt at expressed that time. So that, the desirable emotion expression will be automatically produced out (Humphrey, Pollack, & Hawver, 2008)

Deep Acting

Another acting technique is deep acting. Deep acting occurs when employees' feelings do not fit the situation, they use their training or past experience to work up appropriate emotions. In deep acting or called as "faking with good intentions", she is actually matching her inner feelings with the display norms and this seems veritable to the customer as well (Mittal & Chhabra, 2011). Ashforth and Humphrey also said that a person who used deep acting will try to image about something coherent that could change the actual emotion felt into other emotion in order to generate out desirable emotion expression (Ashforth & Humphrey, 1993). Hochschild classified deep acting as :

(1) exhorting feeling, whereby one actively attempts to evoke or suppress an emotion and

(2) trained imagination, whereby one actively invokes thoughts, images and memories to induce the associated emotion, for instance thinking of a weeding will feel happy or a funeral will feel sad (Hochschild, 1983).

For example, one flight attendant described how she uses the deep acting technique to control her anger when dealing with an annoying customer. She said that she thought the customer was a little child and she probably scared of flying. So, she doesn't get mad even the customer was yelling at her.