ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Organ. Psychol.
Sec. Employee Well-being and Health
Volume 3 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/forgp.2025.1628713
Emotional Demands, Burnout, and Mental Well-Being in Healthcare, Care, and Service Work: The Mediating Role of Surface Acting Across Age
Provisionally accepted
- Faculty of Health and Occupational Studies, University of Gävle, Gävle, Sweden
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This study examines how emotional demands and surface acting contribute to burnout and mental well-being among professionals in healthcare, care, and service roles. A cross-sectional online survey was conducted with 1,506 participants involved in frequent patient, care-receiver, or customer interactions. Using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM), we tested a serial mediation model. Surface acting mediated the relationship between emotional demands and burnout, defined as exhaustion and disengagement. In turn, these burnout dimensions mediated a negative association with mental well-being. These effects were consistent across professional groups, indicating the widespread impact of emotional demands and surface acting across occupations. We found no significant linear or curvilinear age moderation effects in the relationships between emotional demands and surface acting, nor between surface acting and burnout. Only workers aged 60+ showed a slightly stronger reliance on surface acting in response to perceived (but not contactrelated) emotional demands compared to those aged 50-59. The absence of broader age effects suggests that emotional demands and surface acting contribute to burnout and mental well-being similarly across ages. These findings underscore the importance of recognising emotional demands as key occupational hazards affecting workers across professions and throughout the working lifespan.
Keywords: Emotional demands, Surface acting, burnout, Mental well-being, age
Received: 14 May 2025; Accepted: 17 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Popucza, Eriksson and Eriksson. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Timea Zsuzsanna Popucza, Faculty of Health and Occupational Studies, University of Gävle, Gävle, Sweden
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