Nursing students' emotional work and its consequences following encounters with e-patients who present reliable or unreliable information; a scenario based cross sectional survey

Background: Hochschild's theory of emotional work explains how people evoke or suppress emotions in order to adhere to social norms. An encounter with an e-patient who presents potentially unreliable medical information from the internet can lead to caregivers undergoing emotional work. This may have a negative impact on caregivers, such as mental exhaustion or professional dissatisfaction. Objectives: To examine nursing students’ emotional work and its consequences following an encounter with e-patients who present new information from reliable or unreliable internet websites. Design: A cross sectional study. Settings: A large university in the center of Israel. Participants: 376 nursing students (230 Jewish, 146 Arab) of a 4-year BA program. Methods: The study was scenario based describing an e-patient that presents information from a reliable/unreliable website. The students were asked about the emotions the situation evokes in them based on the Emotional Work Questionnaire. In addition, the questionnaire examined the emotional work techniques (surface versus deep acting) and the impact of emotional work on the students. Results: Deep acting emotional work was the most used emotional work technique. Arab students performed more deep acting emotional work compared to Jewish students (F(1,360) = 12.57, p < 0.001). Deep acting emotion work mediated the relationship between ethnicity and the impact of emotion work ((LLCI (-0.1018), ULCI (-0.0199)). Conclusions: The training of nursing students should allow and encourage students’ legitimacy to feel and express various emotions, even when they are contrary to expectations. Sharing others’ (students’, clinical instructors’) feelings that arise in clinical situations is an essential aspect of clinical training. This training may lead to effective emotional management in different situations and allow students to receive help and support that will enable them to develop good coping skills during their studies which will benefit them later in their professional career.