Cummins and King (2017) assert that modern day police representation in the media presents an image of an officer who is suffering with PTSD due to the repeated exposure to workplace trauma. I would add that, as repeated trauma exposure is a sign of experience within the (fictional) police service, PTSD is almost presented as a badge of honour for the HBD who gives everything in the name of the investigation. However, the dissociation that compounds the likelihood of PTSD is also presented as a requirement of the good officer. The feeling rules seem clear: emotions, whether cheery enthusiasm, or distress and fear, are not to be displayed; warmth and compassion within personal relationships are not apparent, with most fictional characters failing to maintain or establish long term romantic partnerships. Even relationships with immediate family are often strained. Fictional characters display hypo-emotionality when presented with what would normally be stressful or distressing situations, particularly in those characters that are presented as our ‘heroes’ of the story. Emotional suppression is the order of the day, and without an emotional language present, the emotional labour of our fictional heroes when repeatedly exposed to trauma, aggression and violent death, is significant. Indeed, anger appears to be the one permissible emotion in a significantly masculine environment where to succeed you need to sacrifice your all for ‘the job’. It is clear that the feelings of the officer are secondary to the needs of the investigation, and surplus to the requirement of being successful within the role.
140
Chapter Five: Phase Two – Narrative Analysis of the
Audio Diaries.
5.1 Introduction.
Understanding feeling rules, how they are communicated and how they contribute to officer mental health is the aim of this research. Emotional Labour is already recognised for its negative impact on the employee, who can experience the alienating loss of ownership and control of their emotions through engagement with organisational feeling and display rules, which often leads to emotional dissonance and burnout (Maslach and Jackson, 1981; Hochschild, 1983). Complying with an organisation’s feeling and display rules is often a form of survival (whether that be economic or social) rather than out of choice (Grandey et al., 2015). The sense of alienation experienced when suppressing authentic emotions does not end when employees leave the working environment. Professional identity (and therefore professional behaviour expectations) is often woven into every aspect of an individual’s life (Yuill, 2005). This is certainly true for police officers, whose behaviour and emotional display is governed, on and off duty, by the Police Code of Ethics (College of Policing, 2014) as well as through organisational, societal and familial expectations. This is a significant weight of power controlling an individual, and officers are aware of the emotional demands made of them: ‘they pay me to be mean’ (Rafaeli and Sutton, 1989:2). More so, officers avoid admitting that aspects of their work are upsetting; feeling that any expression of emotion could be interpreted as a weakness, or not coping. Officers consistently feel unable to speak out, for fear of being viewed as a failure or unreliable: ‘the perpetuating stance being that people knew what they were getting into when they joined the police and being expected to show a stiff upper lip’ (MacEachern et al., 2018:7 Parkes et al., 2018).
Emotional Labour has been identified as causing workers to become ‘robotic, detached, and un-empathetic’ (Wharton, 1999:162), leading to a number of health- related outcomes such as ‘loss of memory, depersonalization, job stress, hypertension, heart disease, emotional exhaustion, and burnout’ (Jeung, et al.,
141 2018:188). This research also seeks to examine the role of emotional labour in negative psychological outcomes for police officers, examining the link between feeling and display rules and dissociative behaviour at the time of, prior to and post traumatic incidents as officers attempt to detach themselves from the emotions experienced when faced with traumatic events in order to comply with feeling and display rules (Aaron, 2000; Lanius et al. 2010).
Therefore, this chapter addresses the first four research questions:
1. How are the feeling rules of the police service of England and Wales perceived by police officers?
2. To what extent are the feeling rules of the police service applied within a police officer’s life?
3. How do these rules influence police officer psychological health?
4. To what extent do police officers use depersonalisation or dissociation as coping mechanisms?
And six objectives:
1. To identify when police officers supress and express emotion in their lives in accordance with the perceived feeling rules of the organisation.
2. To establish how the rules are perceived to operate in relationships: Within the organisation.
With family and friends. With the public.
3. To establish how emotional labour is linked to dissociation and mental health outcomes.
5. To understand the extent to which depersonalisation is perceived as an organisational feeling rule, prior to burnout.
6. To understand if depersonalisation is perceived as a coping mechanism, prior to burnout.
142 This chapter analyses the audio diaries of twenty-seven serving police officers with an overall data collection period of ten months, beginning January 2018 concluding October 2018. This generated 137 diary entries, totalling 25 hours, 16 minutes and 38 seconds, with the shortest diary being seven minutes and sixteen seconds long and the longest diary entry totalling two hundred and fifteen minutes and thirty- three seconds. The number of diary entries completed by individual participants ranged from one to eighteen.
Initially idiographic narrative analysis was undertaken examining plot line, characters and transformation, brought together through emplotment - a synthesis between events, discordance and concordance and different senses of time. Narratives were further examined through Burke’s five elements of dramatisation: act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose (Burke, cited in Riessman, 1993:19). Expressions of Emotional Labour were drawn out through examining individual articulation of: feeling and display rules and how they are communicated, surface acting and deep acting, and emotional suppression and emotional dissonance (Hochschild, 1983). Finally, indications of psychological strain in terms of burnout and dissociation were highlighted (Maslach and Jackson, 1981; Lanius et al. 2010; American Psychiatric Association, 2013). This analysis can be found at Appendix J: Audio Diary Initial Idiographic Narrative Analysis.
Once this was completed the findings were used as the initial codes for the subsequent thematic analysis, with the addition of Lazarus’ (1999) prototypical
A
TAA8:T
HEA
NXIETY OFD
ATAC
OLLECTION(A
PPENDIXA:A
UTHOR’
SR
EFLEXIVED
IARY)I
REFLECT ON HOW DIFFICULT IT WAS TO RECRUIT PARTICIPANTS TO THIS RESEARCH143 examples of 15 emotions, and Hochschild’s (2003) 19 nameable emotions. These were then drawn into themes falling under three categories:
General Themes: addressing what events officers chose to speak about, whom they involved, what emotions they articulated, and where power lay within the scenarios. Themes of Emotional Labour: Feeling and Display Rules, Unit Level Rules, How Feeling and Display Rules are communicated and by whom, How Feeling and Display Rules are enforced, Uncomfortable Display of Authentic Emotions, Emotional Suppression, Surface Acting, Deep Acting, Emotional Dissonance and Emotional Complexity.
Themes examining Psychological Outcomes: Burnout and Dissociation.