The impact of emotional labor on mental health: A systematic review and meta-analysis of multi-occupational groups.

Emotional labor is a crucial occupational mental health issue in service-oriented economies, but research showed inconsistent links to mental health outcomes. This meta-analysis synthesized evidence by analyzing 27 observational studies from six databases using a tiered integrative approach. Results showed that high-exhaustion emotional labor (surface acting and emotional dissonance) correlated significantly positively with overall negative mental health outcomes, including depression, anxiety, insomnia, and general mental health (r = 0.213, P < 0.001). Specifically, surface acting correlated significantly with depression (r = 0.333) and anxiety (r = 0.278), while emotional dissonance correlated significantly with depression (r = 0.321). In contrast, deep acting had no significant correlation with overall negative mental health outcomes (r = 0.047). These findings indicated that it was necessary to develop appropriate intervention measures targeting emotional labor to reduce its adverse impacts on mental health. However, due to significant heterogeneity among studies, the existing evidence base remains relatively limited. Future research should unify emotional labor measurement tools, expand and balance sample sizes, and employ longitudinal and experimental designs to clarify causal relationships, while exploring cultural and occupational moderators, refined links between specific emotional labor dimensions and mental health, and the dynamic effects of deep acting.