Deadlines are an integral part of modern knowledge work. Journalists must publish their weekly columns, managers must submit their monthly reports, and researchers must submit their papers and proposals on time. Despite their ubiquity, deadlines evoke negative feelings and are perceived as challenging events. Consequently, there has been a tendency to abolish deadlines, wherever possible. For example, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) introduced open-ended submissions into some of its funding programs. However, critics have argued that while deadlines can be painful, they are necessary because they motivate people to act.
Researchers from the University of Houston, Texas A&M, and Milan Polytechnic set out to address the central question of the matter: “Does knowledge work near deadlines incur a greater sympathetic charge than knowledge work outside deadlines? ” Sympathetic arousal is the state of physiological arousal that indicates how much people are “on the tips of their toes” and often leads to stress. That’s why its intensity and duration need to be monitored, according to the researchers.
The first study of its kind published in the Proceedings of the ACM Human factors in informaticsIt was led by Ioannis Pavlidis, professor of computer science and director of the UH Data and Affective Computing Laboratory.
Per an institutionally approved ethical protocol, 10 consenting researchers were monitored while working in the office in the two days before a critical deadline and another two days without an impeding deadline. Miniature cameras were placed in the researchers’ university office to discreetly record their physiology and facial expressions, as well as their movements throughout the workday. The sympathetic activation of the participants was measured every second through the quantification of their perinasal perspiration levels in images.
By applying advanced data modeling to hundreds of hours of data recordings, the team found that researchers experience high sympathetic activation while working, which speaks to the challenging nature of the research profession. Surprisingly, this high sympathetic activation remains the same with or without timing.
“Research is difficult every day,” Pavlidis said. “To use a metaphor, if you’re in heavy rain all the time, if one day the rain is a little bit heavier, it wouldn’t make much of a difference to you because you’re already wet to the skin. This is what our models show with respect. to the effect of deadlines on researchers”.
The only factors that exacerbated sympathetic activation were extensive smartphone use and prolific reading/writing. The first factor is a manifestation of device addiction trends that have altered human behaviors across the board. The second factor is an integral part of the research work and, therefore, unavoidable. Fortunately, however, the researchers appear to self-regulate increases in their sympathetic activation by instinctively adjusting the frequency of physical pauses. It was observed that, on average, researchers take a physical break every two hours. From this baseline, data analysis showed that for every 50% increase in sympathetic activation, rest frequency nearly doubled, revealing the limits of cognitive work under increasing stress.
“Our naturalistic study not only provides new insights into the behavior of researchers, but also challenges some prevailing views on timelines,” Pavlidis said. “With recent advances in affective computing, I expect these naturalistic studies to proliferate in all domains, challenging the misconceptions we have about many things,” Pavlidis added.
The study was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation.
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