Emotional dissonance, burnout, and psychological distress among Chinese human service professionals

Emotional dissonance refers to the incongruence between genuinely felt emotions and organizational guided emotions, which has shown to predispose employees to various negative health outcomes. The present study aimed to examine the associations among emotional dissonance, burnout, and psychological distress in 288 Chinese human service professionals. In line with previous studies, results of correlation analyses revealed that emotional dissonance was related to high levels of psychological distress and burnout dimensions, namely emotional exhaustion, lack of personal accomplishment, and depersonalization. Moreover, findings of structural equation modeling showed that burnout partially mediated the associations between emotional dissonance and psychological distress