playing doctor

Great, so now I won't have any idea if my doctor cares or is just practicing "deep acting". I think I prefer the hardass doctor to the fake empathetic doctor anyway.

From my alumni newsletter:
Drawing from previous research that equates service workers' labor to the work of stage actors, Larson and co-author Xin Yao, a doctoral student in the UW Business School, describe a model for applying acting techniques to the delivery of empathy in doctor-patient interactions. They suggest that doctors use two techniques separately or in combination -- 'deep acting,' which uses imagination and emotional memories to generate genuine feelings of empathy for the patient, and 'surface acting,' in which the doctor forges emotional expressions inconsistent with internal feelings. This would allow the doctor to display behaviors the patient can interpret as empathic.