Admiration, Joy, and Love: The Examination of Emotion in Surgery

Abstract

“No other calling . . . demands a more absolute self-negation than the one you have chosen. No other vocation — not even the sacred ministration of religion itself — requires a more constant exercise of the higher faculties of the human mind, or a more earnest devotion of the purer and nobler attributes of the human soul.”- Governor J. Proctor Knott to the graduating class of the Kentucky School of Medicine, 1890 Emotional labor is the regulation and management of emotional expressions with others that occur as part of one’s professional work role. Everyday emotional labor is preformed parallel to physical labor by surgeons. However, it is widely undocumented within the surgical field. Emotional labor may be taking an under-appreciated toll on surgeons. Unacknowledged emotional labor and related coping mechanisms may be contributing to emotional exhaustion and the alarming levels of chronic burnout among surgeons. The emotional demands of surgery practice on surgical practitioners needs scholarly attention. This thesis uses surgeon-written social media posts to examine surgeon emotion. A thematic analysis of surgeon Tweets was conducted to investigate how surgeons communicate emotion on Twitter. Emotion categorization was conducted using Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions (Plutchik, 1980). The positive psychology framework of Character Strengths and Virtues (Peterson & Seligman, 2004) and the Areas of Worklife Model (Maslach & Leiter, 1997) were used for results interpretation. In the analysis of surgeon emotion on Twitter, it was found that Tweets with positive emotion represented the majority of Tweets (55%). Complex emotions represented 34% of the sample while Tweets with negative emotion represented only 11%. Feelings of admiration, joy, and love were most frequently Tweeted. Despite high levels of emotional exhaustion and chronic burnout in the profession, surgeons overwhelmingly Tweet with positive emotion in association with their work. Positive emotion and positive psychology interventional measures may provide better strategies to combat emotional exhaustion and to promote well-being in surgery. These findings help advance the understanding of emotion in surgical practice and may help inform best practices for education and training in emotional labor, emotional intelligence, and emotion regulation in surgical work.