Multitasking is a huge part of working, especially when you're an office worker, and you have to handle different things at once, such as answering emails while writing reports and so on.
Multitasking and Negative Emotions
Although most companies find it useful to hire people who are good at multitasking, it now appears that this can negatively affect an employee as these interruptions could cause stress and sadness, which would develop into a tense workplace environment down the line.
In a report by Mirage News, this was the finding of a study that aims to understand how emotional culture at the workplace is shaped and created.
The study was created by a group of researchers led by Ioannis Pavlidis, the director of the Computational Physiology Laboratory at the University of Houston.
"Not only do people experience stress with multitasking, but their faces may also express unpleasant emotions, and that can have negative consequences for the entire office culture," Pavlidis said.
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Testing the Theory
Their result was acquired through the use of a new algorithm that was based on co-occurrence matrices.
The algorithm was able to analyze the emotions that manifested in the faces of knowledge workers in the middle of writing an essay task.
There are two groups of essay writers, with one group only given a single batch of emails that they have to reply to while writing, which limits their interruption, while the other group is continuously barraged with emails as they come in, thus giving them more interruption.
According to Pavlidis, the group that had to answer more emails as they came in appeared sadder than the other group.
More interesting is that they weren't only sad; their sadness appeared to have a hint of fear mixed in.
"Multitasking imposes an onerous mental load and is associated with elevated stress, which appears to trigger the displayed sadness. The simultaneous onset of fear is intriguing and is likely rooted to subconscious anticipation of the next disruption," the researcher added.
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Prolonged Negative Emotions in the Workplace
Since multitasking is a common practice at workplaces, the negative emotions that come with it could persist throughout the day, which would ultimately create a dangerous workplace environment for the employee.
Although the other group fared better than the ones who were constantly interrupted, they weren't entirely unscathed.
According to the researchers, this group was mostly neutral while they were doing their essay writing tasks.
However, there was a hint of anger in their faces when they moved to the other task, which was answering a bunch of emails.
The researchers theorize that the anger came from the realization of the amount of work needed to answer all of the emails in one session, but since it happens in a short period of time, the negative emotions don't last long.
Negative emotions don't just affect one employee.
If one is constantly stressed and angry, it could spread throughout the workplace like wildfire, according to the paper that was published in the Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
The study was backed up by the National Science Foundation, which granted the researchers a $1.2 million grant.
