The Relationships between Emotional Labour and Depressive Symptoms Among Nurses in University Hospitals

Abstract The purpose of this study was to find out the relationships between emotional labour and depressive symptoms among nurses in university hospitals. Subjects were 514 nurses working at three university hospitals in Daejeon City, and the survey was a structured self- administered questionnaire based from April 1 until May 31 2012. As a results, the level of depressive symptoms by the subjects emotional labour level was significantly higher in the group with higher total average points of the emotional labour than the lower group, As for the correlation between the level of depressive symptoms and emotional labour factors, the depressive symptoms points showed significant positive correlation with the total points of the emotional labour. As a result of hierarchical multiple regression, age, leisure time, coffee consumption, subjective health status, physical burden of work, sense of satisfaction at work, fit to the job and emotional labour were selected as significant variables and related variables effecting the level of depressive symptoms. These variables ’ descriptive power was 39.4%