How Stress and Mental Workload are Connected

Alsuraykh, Norah H.; Wilson, Max L.; Tennent, Paul; Sharples, Sarah

Abstract

Mental Workload (MWL) can be both good and bad; we can thrive under high MWL, or our performance can drop if the demands become either too low or too high. Similarly, stress is not always bad, short term stress can be beneficial to overcome a challenge or dangerous situation. In our research, we have seen both people that enjoy high workload, and people that feel stressed by it, but we do not know whether that experience of stress significantly affects our measurements. Our recent results show that fNIRS measurements are affected by stress (measured by SSSQ). This paper seeks to discuss the relationship between these concepts, discussing examples of where similar influencing factors appear within models of both Stress and Mental Workload, as well as within subjective measures of them. We conclude that future work must consider participants' experiences of both Stress and Mental Workload, as well as other cognitive concepts, when trying to estimate them from physiological measures.

Citation

Alsuraykh, N. H., Wilson, M. L., Tennent, P., & Sharples, S. (2019, May). How Stress and Mental Workload are Connected. Presented at PervasiveHealth'19: The 13th International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare, Trento, Italy

• Presentation Conference Type: Edited Proceedings
• Conference Name: PervasiveHealth'19: The 13th International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare
• Start Date: May 20, 2019
• End Date: May 23, 2019
• Acceptance Date: Apr 8, 2019
• Online Publication Date: May 20, 2019
• Publication Date: May 20, 2019
• Deposit Date: Jun 5, 2019
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 6, 2019
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Pages: 371-376
• Book Title: PervasiveHealth'19: Proceedings of the 13th EAI International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare
• ISBN: 9781450361262
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3329189.3329235
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/2145957
• Publisher URL: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3329235
• Contract Date: Jun 5, 2019