Email makes you sweat: Examining email interruptions and stress with thermal imaging

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 afected by memory and emotional biases. In this paper, we use a thermal imaging system to obtain objective measures of stress and investigate personality diferences 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 oice environment with two diferent email contexts: managing email in batch mode or with frequent interruptions. We discovered that people who score high in Neuroticism are signiicantly more stressed in batching environments than those low in Neuroticism. People who are more stressed inish emails faster. Last, using Linguistic Inquiry Word Count on the email text, we ind that higher stressed people in multitasking environments use more anger in their emails. These indings help to disambiguate prior conlicting results on email batching and stress.