Professor Uwe Dulleck, believes stress in the workplace is not necessarily a bad thing, because it is, in fact, a natural reaction.
Professor Dulleck is leading the Australian arm of a study that was awarded an Australian Research Council grant to study the effects of both positive and negative stress on workers’ decision-making.
“The study will use heart rate monitors to measure the stress of people ‘on the job’ and in the controlled environment of an experimental economics computer laboratory as they interact and communicate,” Professor Dulleck said.
“We will measure how much they are stressed in certain situations and whether that is positive or negative stress, this will be measured against how they behaved and what decisions they made - whether they made rational or emotional decisions.”
Professor Dulleck said negative stress could be detected by measuring a person’s heart beat and its variations over short intervals of time.
