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An interview with Dr. Sarah Rose Cavanagh, associate professor of psychology at Assumption College about how surface acting affects employees.

Academic study of the question: How is credit for group work allocated when individual contributions are not perfectly observed?

A psychotherapist recounts stories of emotional exhaustion and its social causes.

A personal article about the emotional labor involved in managing open source projects.

Funded report about the challenges facing open source software and sustainability when free labor is exploited by businesses that do not contribute.

On-demand workers end up performing outsize amounts of what sociologists call “emotional labor,” or expressive work to make the customer experience a positive one so that users come back to the platform. This work extends beyond good customer service: It involves actively reshaping a worker’s inner emotional life to conform to employers’ and customers’ expectations of emotional performance.

A counter to many recent articles that tries to recenter the conversation about emotional labor onto issues of patriarchy.