Conscientiousness in Pilots Correlates with Electrodermal Stability: Study on Simulated Flights under Social Stress

Abstract

For pilots, the capacity to cope with anxiety is crucial during a flight since they may be confronted with stressful situations. According to the Big Five Inventory, this capacity can be modulated by two important personality traits: conscientiousness and neuroticism. The former would be related to concentration skills and the latter to the attention bias towards anxiety-provoking stimuli. Given the current development of monitoring systems for detecting the users’ state, which can be incorporated into cockpits, it is desirable to estimate their robustness to inter-individual personality differences. Indeed, several emotion recognition methods are based on physiological responses that can be modulated by specific personality profiles. The personality traits of twenty pilots were assessed. Afterwards, they performed two consecutive simulated flights without and with induced social stress while electrodermal activity was measured. Their subjective anxiety was assessed before the second flight, prior to the stress-induced condition. The results showed that higher scores in neuroticism correlated positively with cognitive and somatic anxiety. Moreover, under social stress, higher scores in conscientiousness correlated positively with electrodermal stability, i.e., a lower number of skin conductance responses. These results on both self-reported and physiological responses are in favor of the integration of personality differences into pilots’ state monitoring.

Stress and Workload Assessment in Aviation—A Narrative Review

“…35 ST articles were found [ 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 , 36 , 37 , 38 , 39 , 40 , 41 , 42 , 43 , 44 , 45 , 46 , 47 , 48 , 49 , 50 , 51 , 52 , 53 , 54 , 55 , 56 , 57 , 58 , 59 , 60 , 61 , 62 , 63 ]. In this context, the simulation of a flight task enables the control of experimental stimuli, such as the addition of engine failures (e.g., [ 43 ]), turbulence (e.g., [ 35 ]) or visibility setting (e.g., [ 30 ]).…”

“…Self-Assessment (S) methodologies were employed in 20 ST articles [ 30 , 32 , 35 , 37 , 38 , 39 , 40 , 41 , 42 , 43 , 45 , 46 , 47 , 48 , 50 , 53 , 54 , 55 , 57 , 63 ] and in 10 RF articles [ 64 , 65 , 66 , 67 , 69 , 70 , 71 , 73 , 74 , 75 ]. Most of these studies used the Nasa–Task Load index (Nasa-TLX) [ 77 ], which is computed from a simple and strongly validated questionnaire, which is administered after task execution.…”

“…Performance assessment involves a double perspective: the evaluation of the “goodness” of the executed task and the modeling of the expected performance, considering different input data (e.g., heart rate, workload level, task features). The analysis of the selected papers revealed that 16 out of 48 articles made use of this kind of analysis [ 30 , 31 , 32 , 35 , 36 , 37 , 39 , 42 , 43 , 46 , 48 , 49 , 50 , 51 , 54 , 56 ], all belonging to ST articles. The goodness of an execution of a task can be assessed via the evaluation of the strictness in following the instructions.…”

Exploring the influence of personal factors on physiological responses to mental imagery in sport

“…The linkage between personality, anxiety and responses to different challenging situations has been previously confirmed. In the study by Hidalgo-Munoz et al 29 on pilots where the capacity to cope with anxiety during a flight was similar to the prestart situation when the stressful situation occurred, the results confirmed that neuroticism was linked to cognitive and somatic anxiety. Even when the neuroticism scores were moderate, a positive correlation with the pilots’ subjective anxiety was found while they were carrying out the tasks under the social stressor.…”

Spontaneous Breathing Rate Variations Linked to Social Exclusion and Emotion Self-assessment

“…These affective reactions are usually accompanied by physiological responses from the autonomic nervous system (Kreibig, 2010 ). Although these body manifestations can be affected by specific personality traits (Hidalgo-Muñoz et al, 2021 ; Stemmler & Wacker, 2010 ), some physiological patterns seem to be similar across people coping with difficult social interactions, even when different levels of fear to negative social evaluations were present (Chen & Drummond, 2008 ). Therefore, it would be possible to associate physiological response modulations with emotion dynamics in specific interpersonal contexts.…”