PPRNet Clinical summary: Self-Compassion and Experience May Reduce Emotional Labour in Psychotherapists

Burnout is prevalent among psychologists providing psychotherapy. Burnout refers to emotional exhaustion, a cynical attitude towards work, and low self-efficacy. It can result in negative outcomes for clinicians including poorer wellbeing, poorer performance, increased errors and leaving the profession. One job demand that may contribute to burnout is emotional labour, which refers to internal emotional states that are incongruent with the demands of the occupation. Employees may experience a discrepancy or dissonance between the rules governing emotional displays in a profession and their actual feelings at work. For example, psychotherapists’ roles may require high levels of empathy, emotional expression, and relational connection, which they may or may not feel during their workday. An individual may regulate emotions to resolve this dissonance by expressing, suppressing, or faking their emotions. They may engage in surface acting by faking emotions, or in deep acting by genuinely realigning their internal feelings with their expressed emotions. In this study, Clarke and colleagues were interested in defining profiles of psychologists providing psychotherapy based on their emotional labour, and then tested whether these profiles differed on key burnout-related dimensions. For the study, 232 international psychologists who practice psychotherapy completed questionnaires across two time points. The psychologists were mostly female (78.9%), with an average age of 40.15 (SD=11.06), and provided an average of 17.04 (SD=7.36) psychotherapy sessions per week. The researchers conducted a latent profile analysis to identify profiles of psychologists based on emotional labour. They found four profiles like those found in other professions. Non-actors (7.76% of the psychologists) used fewer emotional labour regulation strategies; that is, they did not engage in emotional labour to regulate their emotions. Deep actors (21.98%) tended to engage in less emotion suppression and faking, and more emotional expression than the other groups. Surface actors (15.95%) showed lower emotional expression than deep actors but higher levels of suppression and faking emotions. Low actors (54.31%) were the largest group of psychologists and tended to be average compared to other groups on emotional suppression, expression, and faking. Deep actors might be considered to have the least emotional labour dissonance, whereas surface actors are likely to have the most dissonance. Surface actors had significantly lower levels of self-compassion, less professional experience, and greater emotional exhaustion than deep actors.

Psychologists who were surface actors had lower self-compassion and less career experience, and were more susceptible to burnout. Deep actors, characterized by more natural expression and alignment of their feelings with the emotional demands of the work, were less susceptible to burnout. Self-compassion may help therapists be more accepting and authentic about the feelings required to do the work. It is possible that with greater clinical experience, some psychotherapists increasingly develop this capacity.

Clarke, J.J., Mancini, V.O., Rees, C.S., & Breen, L.J. (2026). The role of self-compassion and experience in psychologists’ latent emotional labour strategy profiles. Journal of Clinical Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1002/jclp.70133.