According to a Swiss study, how a person types on a keyboard and moves their cursor can say more about how stressed they are than their heart rate. — Photo: Henning Kaiser/dpa
GENEVA: One employee hacks away at the keyboard and jolts their cursor across the computer screen in sudden motions. Another types gently and moves their cursor with slow precision.
Which person is stressed?
A Swiss study has found that the way a person types and uses their mouse can say more about their stress level than their heart rate. (And yes, it's the keyboard-hacking, mouse-jolting worker that is stressed).
"People who are stressed move the mouse pointer more often and less accurately and cover longer distances on the screen," says mathematician Mara Nägelin, who, together with her colleagues from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich, presented her findings in the scientific journal Cell in April.
"Relaxed people, on the other hand, take shorter, more direct routes to reach their goal and take more time doing so." Stressed people make more mistakes when typing and they write in bursts with many short pauses. Relaxed people made fewer, but longer pauses when writing.
How can the connection between stress and typing and mouse behaviour be explained? "Increased stress has a negative effect on our brain's ability to process information. This also impairs our motor skills," said psychologist and co-author Jasmine Kerr (also ETH).
Psychiatrist and stress researcher Mazda Adli, head physician at the Fliedner Klinik Berlin and who was not involved in the study, described the study's methodology as groundbreaking.
"This is an interesting approach to studying individual susceptibility to stress," he said. "You could use the method in the future to examine how susceptible you are to stress and disruption under certain external conditions, then change something in your environment and see if your susceptibility to stress has changed."
What did the experiment look like in the lab?
The researchers monitored computer mouse and keyboard behaviour, as well as heart rates, in 90 people.
All did realistic office tasks in the lab. Some remained undisturbed, others additionally went through a job interview or constantly received new chat messages.
The scientists used machine learning and asked people about their perception of stress. "We were surprised that typing and mouse behaviour was better at predicting how stressed subjects felt than their heart rate," Nägelin says.
In everyday work, many people feel distracted by constantly new emails, chat messages or phone calls, Adli said.
"Distractibility triggers stress." In that case, it makes sense to shield yourself from distracting impulses: Only read emails every two hours, make it clear when you don't want to be disturbed and take regular breaks.
Adli emphasises that not all stress is negative. A public lecture or a competition can create a stress peak, which can be stimulating and ensure good performance or even a pleasant feeling. It becomes problematic when stress peaks do not subside again and those affected cannot recover from them.
Can this study help everyday work lives?
Whether stress recognition according to the ETH model makes sense in the workplace, for example to prevent damage to health, is a delicate question. "We want to help workers recognise stress at an early stage, not create a monitoring tool for companies," said Kerr.
Adli can imagine its use more for self-assessment. From an occupational health point of view, use would only be conceivable under absolute protection of anonymity, Adli said. – dpa
