Work in Progress

Sympathetic Activation in Deadlines of Deskbound Research - A Study in the Wild

Authors:

MD Tanim Hasan,

Amanveer Wesley,

Panagiotis Tsiamyrtzis,

Ioannis PavlidisAuthors Info & Claims

CHI EA '23: Extended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Article No.: 265, Pages 1 - 8

https://doi.org/10.1145/3544549.3585585

Published: 19 April 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Paper and proposal deadlines are important milestones, conjuring up emotional memories to researchers. The question is if in the daily challenging world of scholarly research, deadlines truly incur higher sympathetic loading than the alternative. Here we report results from a longitudinal, in the wild study of n = 10 researchers working in the presence and absence of impeding deadlines. Unlike the retrospective, questionnaire-based studies of research deadlines in the past, our study is real-time and multimodal, including physiological, observational, and psychometric measurements. The results suggest that deadlines do not significantly add to the sympathetic loading of researchers. Irrespective of deadlines, the researchers’ sympathetic activation is strongly associated with the amount of reading and writing they do, the extent of smartphone use, and the frequency of physical breaks they take. The latter likely indicates a natural mechanism for regulating sympathetic overactivity in deskbound research, which can inform the design of future break interfaces.

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Cited By

Long TGero KChilton L(2024)Not Just Novelty: A Longitudinal Study on Utility and Customization of an AI WorkflowProceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3643834.3661587(782-803)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643834.3661587
Anders CMoontaha SReal SArnrich B(2024)Unobtrusive measurement of cognitive load and physiological signals in uncontrolled environmentsScientific Data10.1038/s41597-024-03738-711:1Online publication date: 13-Sep-2024
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-024-03738-7

Index Terms

Sympathetic Activation in Deadlines of Deskbound Research - A Study in the Wild
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Human computer interaction (HCI)
    1. Empirical studies in HCI

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

CHI EA '23: Extended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 2023

3914 pages

ISBN:9781450394222

DOI:10.1145/3544549

Editors:
Albrecht Schmidt
LMU Munich, Germany
,
Kaisa Väänänen
Tampere University, Finland
,
Tesh Goyal
Google Research, USA
,
Per Ola Kristensson
University of Cambridge, UK
,
Anicia Peters
University of Namibia, Namibia

Copyright © 2023 Owner/Author.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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Published: 19 April 2023

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April 23 - 28, 2023

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Cited By

Long TGero KChilton L(2024)Not Just Novelty: A Longitudinal Study on Utility and Customization of an AI WorkflowProceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3643834.3661587(782-803)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643834.3661587
Anders CMoontaha SReal SArnrich B(2024)Unobtrusive measurement of cognitive load and physiological signals in uncontrolled environmentsScientific Data10.1038/s41597-024-03738-711:1Online publication date: 13-Sep-2024
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-024-03738-7

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