Nursing students' emotional work and its consequences following encounters with e-patients who present reliable or unreliable information; a scenario based cross sectional survey

Playing the Role of a Nurse in a Virtual Reality Simulation: A Safe Environment for Emotion Management

BACKGROUND

Nurses' successful emotional coping with unpleasant emotions triggered by intense clinical situations is associated with better-quality patient care. Nursing students experience significant challenges with managing their emotions in clinical practice.

PURPOSE

To evaluate a virtual reality (VR)-based simulation as a platform for emotional management training.

METHODS

A pretest-posttest research design was used to study sophomore nursing students (n = 75) while learning with a VR simulation.

RESULTS

Playing the role of a nurse in a VR hospital triggered an emotional dissonance to uncover students' management strategies, specifically deep cognitive acting and surface acting strategies. Surface acting emphasizes emotions that are displayed but not genuinely experienced and was negatively associated with posttest knowledge scores (r =-0.34, P < .05).

CONCLUSION

Learning with VR can provide a safe environment both for acquiring knowledge and for revealing students' emotional management, which, in turn, can be leveraged by educators to redirect the emotion work required in the nursing profession.

Emotional labor as emotional regulation: Italian adaptation and longitudinal validation of the scale among undergraduate nursing students

AIM

The aim of the present study is to perform a longitudinal Italian validation of the scale and to adapt it to the nursing education contest.

BACKGROUND

Research on emotional labor has shown that the roles played by surface acting and deep acting are still uncertain. To overcome this gap, scholars suggest observing emotional labor through the lens of the emotional regulation theory. Andela and her colleagues developed a fine grained instrument, which differentiates attentional deployment, cognitive re-evaluation and expressive suppression, emotional amplification and emotional dissonance.

DESIGN

To fulfill our aim, a longitudinal study was performed in an Italian University.

METHOD

The adapted scale was administered to 168 nursing students across the three years of attendance in the course.

RESULTS

Our results confirm the five-factor structure, and the instrument shows good psychometrical properties.

CONCLUSION

Having shown satisfactory psychometric properties, this scale can be considered a useful instrument to assess those emotional elements of clinical practice, which are important for the assurance of education quality to the under graduated nursing students.