Abstract The concept of emotional labor originated from sociological research in the early 1980s. Since then three decades have passed, research related to the topic has revealed a great bundle of important findings and the connotation of emotional labor has been evolving. Through extensive literature review, this study illustrated and compared three different perspectives of emotional labor definitions, intending to figure out the theoretical development sequence of display rule, surface acting and deep acting. Further, the distinction and connection between emotional labor and emotional regulation and emotional intelligence as well was investigated. Finally, the future research directions were discussed.
2015, Vol. 12 
