Ahn, J., Jun, S., Min, S., Lee, J., Lee, S-K., Park, S.H., & Han, S. Altered emotional attention and brain functional connectivity networks of emotional laborers [Poster]
Background
Emotional labor refers to a process in which workers are expected to regulate their feelings and emotional expression during interactions with clients. It has been proposed that a high level of emotional demands in work induces chronic stress and instigates various physical and psychological health problems such as musculoskeletal disorders, depressive symptom, burnout, and self-alienation (Kim & Choo, 2017; Tuten & Neidermeyer, 2004). Although an increasing number of workers suffer from negative effects of emotional labor, only a few studies have investigated how emotional labor can affect behavioral and neural processing of emotional stimuli, such as threatening faces. The present study aims to identify differential behavioral and neural mechanisms in emotional attention processing of emotional labor and control groups.
Experimental Procedure
Eighteen emotional laborers and twenty-four healthy controls were recruited and underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Two conditions were set in the experimental task: emotionally congruence and incongruence conditions. In the congruence condition, participants viewed two neutral facial stimuli. In contrast, one neutral and one negative facial stimulus were simultaneously presented in the incongruence condition. Face stimuli (37.5 mm × 50 mm) were presented for 500 ms before being replaced by a probe. The probes were either a Korean alphabet ‘ã„·’ or ‘ã…Œ’ corresponding to English letter ‘D’ or ‘T’. The probe location was contingent on the valence of the word stimulus, in that the probe would always appear in the location occupied by the neutral stimulus, and never the location occupied by threat. Participants were instructed to discriminate which probe was presented by pressing a left or right fMRI-compatible button pad as fast as they could. They were not told that probes would be presented only in the place of neutral stimuli.
Results
First, we found selective attention to negative stimuli was not only sustained but also enhanced in emotional laborers, in that their latencies of detecting probes were more delayed in incongruence condition than the controls. Next, we used general linear modeling (GLM) method to compare brain activations across conditions and groups. GLM results showed heightened activations of the left middle temporal gyrus, middle occipital gyrus, and bilateral fusiform gyrus, and decreased activations of the bilateral amygdala, hippocampus, and left insula in emotional laborers when viewing both negative and neutral stimuli. Lastly, functional connectivity multivariate pattern analysis (fcMVPA) using a support vector machine algorithm was conducted to discriminate brain connectivity patterns of two groups. fcMVPA classified emotional laborers and controls with an accuracy of 90.5% using 64 features in incongruence trials. The prefrontal cortex showed the highest betweenness centrality in performing the classification. In congruence trials, however, two groups were classified with a decreased accuracy of 88.1 %. Also, a larger set of 1033 features were required to elicit the performance, which suggests decreased network efficiency in classifying two groups. Furthermore, it was demonstrated that the overall functional connectivity between fcMVPA nodes decreased in emotional labor group.
Conclusion
These findings suggest that attentive ability to disengage from negative emotion is impeded in emotional laborers, which might be the results of persistent exposure to stress and emotive dissonance. This behavioral impediment can be attributed to the altered recruitment of functional connectivity patterns centering the prefrontal cortex, amygdala, and insula especially when there is a need for processing negative emotion.
Keywords: emotional labor, chronic stress, emotional attention, fMRI, amygdala, hippocampus, insula, prefrontal cortex
References
1. Kim, H.-J., & Choo, J. (2017). Emotional labor: Links to depression and work-related musculoskeletal disorders in call center workers. Workplace health & safety, 65(8), 346-354.
2. Tuten, T. L., & Neidermeyer, P. E. (2004). Performance, satisfaction and turnover in call centers: The effects of stress and
optimism. Journal of Business Research, 57(1), 26-34.
