Associate Professor of Management’s Research on Emotions in the Workplace Cited in PsyPost and Big Think

Emotional labor research conducted by Eller College of Management Associate Professor of Management and Organizations Allison S. Gabriel was referenced in a January 9 PsyPost article and a January 15 Big Think article.

Both articles analyze the 2020 study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, “Are Coworkers Getting into the Act? An Examination of Emotion Regulation in Coworker Exchanges,” by Gabriel and co-authors Joel Koopman, Christopher C. Rosen, John D. Arnold and Wayne A. Hochwarter.

“We studied two forms of emotion regulation—surface acting, which involves faking your positive emotions when interacting with coworkers and deep acting, which involves actually trying to feel positive emotions and display them during your coworker exchanges,” explains Gabriel. “Across three studies, our results are quite clear that people who are deep actors reap the greatest benefits in terms of lower fatigue and improved coworker treatment.”

Allison Gabriel joined the Eller College of Management in 2015 after serving as an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University for two years. She earned her PhD in industrial and organizational psychology in 2013 from the University of Akron. Her research focuses on emotions at work, employee recovery, interpersonal work stressors, relationships at work, motivation and employee well-being. She currently serves as an associate editor at Journal of Applied Psychology.