A Refined Examination of Worker Age and Stress: Explaining How, and Why, Older Workers Are Especially Techno-Stressed in the Interruption Age

Several theories of age differences in memory and attention have been proposed, including the theories of environmental support, deliberate processing, failure to integrate context, working memory demands, perceptual speed, and failures of inhibition [24]. The theory of environmental support suggests that older adults need more support to engage in effective information processing than younger people, implying that they are less efficient at self-initiated information processing. Similar to the preceding theory, deliberate processing implies that the magnitude of age differences in memory depends on the extent to which a tasks involves deliberate information processing instead of more automatic, habitual processing. Failure to integrate context is a concept that is more specific than the preceding one, suggesting that older adults cannot take advantage of contextual cues because they have problems integrating the memory context with the information they are attempting to remember. The theory of working memory demands is simple, implying, on the basis of the large and reliable age differences that have been found in working memory tasks, that older adults’ disadvantages in information processing increase with increasing task demands on working memory. Similarly, the theory of perceptual speed indicates that older adults are slower and process information more slowly than their younger counterparts as a function of the cognitive complexity of a task. Finally, the theory of failures of inhibition posits that older adults are much less able than younger people to actively disregard interrupting stimuli in a task environment [24]. In summary, large age differences in memory and attention can be found to the extent to which a task lacks environmental support, requires deliberate processing, involves integrating to-be-remembered information with context, has large working memory demands, can be influenced by perceptual speed, or requires inhibition of irrelevant information [24]. For this study, we deem the theories of environmental support, deliberate processing, and failure to integrate context as not relevant since our focus is on inhibiting attentional responses to interruptions rather than on support or context. Similarly, while the theories of working memory demands and perceptual speed are applicable to our study context, they are too generic to effectively inform the development of our research hypotheses. The concept of failures of inhibition, however, is directly applicable to our study.

It is important to note that the Stroop task is not a stress test but a measure of cognitive functioning. In particular, short Stroop tasks like the one employed here (duration of less than ten minutes) cannot be expected to create stress [36]. Further, the Stroop task employed here was not an experimental treatment but simply a measure of inhibitory deficit (a trait).