Title
Email Makes You Sweat - Examining Email Interruptions and Stress Using Thermal Imaging.
Abstract
Workplace environments are characterized by frequent interruptions that can lead to stress. However, measures of stress due to interruptions are typically obtained through self-reports, which can be affected by memory and emotional biases. In this paper, we use a thermal imaging system to obtain objective measures of stress and investigate personality differences in contexts of high and low interruptions. Since a major source of workplace interruptions is email, we studied 63 participants while multitasking in a controlled office environment with two different email contexts: managing email in batch mode or with frequent interruptions. We discovered that people who score high in Neuroticism are significantly more stressed in batching environments than those low in Neuroticism. People who are more stressed finish emails faster. Last, using Linguistic Inquiry Word Count on the email text, we find that higher stressed people in multitasking environments use more anger in their emails. These findings help to disambiguate prior conflicting results on email batching and stress.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1145/3290605.3300898
CHI
Keywords
Field
DocType
email, empirical study, interruptions, multitasking, personality, sensors, stress, thermal imaging
Neuroticism,Computer science,Word count,Human–computer interaction,Anger,Human multitasking,Applied psychology,Empirical research,Personality,Stress measures
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4503-5970-2
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
14