PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to identify the effects of violence experience, emotional labor and job stress on clinical nurses' depression and to provide suggestions for improving the quality of patient care. METHODS: This research involved 257 clinical nurses who were working at an acute care hospital with at least 200 beds in S city and K province. Data were collected from May 23 to June 7 in 2014 and were analyzed using IBM SPSS version 21.0. RESULTS: The results show that 98.1% of subjects had violence experience in the past year and the violence experience included 44.4% physical threat, 37.5% verbal violence and 18.1% physical violence. The average scores were emotional labor 3.57, job stress 3.54 and depression 21.16. There were positive correlations among violence experience, emotional labor, job stress and depression (p<.01). There were also significant co-relationships between depression and violence experience (r=.21, p=.001), between depression and emotional labor (r=.48, p<.001) and between depression and job stress (r=.31, p<.001). CONCLUSION: The results suggest that it is necessary to set up guidelines for clinical nurses to manage violence, emotional labor and job stress in order to create better working environment and to improve quality of patient care.