The Emotions Involved in Care and Training. The Emotional Dimension Amongst Nursing Students

Emotion management (especially negative ones such as frustration and disgust) is one of the key aspects of care work (Ashforth & Humphrey, 1993; Grandey, 2000; Morris & Feldman, 1996) and is therefore one of the sources of stress, with consequences that can even have physical repercussions (Gross, 2002). In care work, the carer is expected to feel and show emotions that are in line with and appropriate to the situation, which requires, as Hochschild (1979) says, two types of work: evocative work, when the emotions required by the context are shown, even when they are not felt; suppressive work, when emotions that are not appropriate to the situation are controlled to the point that they are eliminated. This requires emotional awareness and work on one’s emotional dimension (Mortari, 2017), which oscillates between detachment and involvement (Zamperini, Paoloni & Testoni, 2015), and would appear to take shape in the training stage. The qualitative study was conducted between March and June 2018, by organising a focus group amongst nursing students at the University of Verona’s Trento campus. The aim of the study was to investigate the emotional experience of nursing students, by analysing the changes and transformations taking place over the three-year course, with regard to the teaching experiences (lectures and seminars, workshops, practical training) and, consequently, the relationships with the various figures with which the students come into contact (lecturers, tutors, ward tutors, fellow students, ward nurses, etc.). The topics around which the focus group outline was constructed were as follows: The emotional recognition process: the process of understanding what one is feeling; Emotional negotiation: working on emotions; Conventional alignment: the management of emotions in relation to the context.