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.
Highlights
Current research in Human Factors shows an increasing interest in developing tailored systems able to determine the affective states of pilots in order to estimate whether they will be able to guarantee safety and to cope with stressful and highly cognitive demanding flying situations [1]
The present study aims to examine the impact of pilot personality on self-reported anxiety and on a relevant physiological measure, the skin conductance response (SCR), which can be cost-effectively incorporated into such systems, while performing a flight simulation task under pressure
The main results were, on the one hand, the positive relation between neuroticism and anxiety intensity; on the other hand, the positive relation between electrodermal stability and conscientiousness level when pilots were placed in stressful conditions
Summary
Current research in Human Factors shows an increasing interest in developing tailored systems able to determine the affective states of pilots in order to estimate whether they will be able to guarantee safety and to cope with stressful and highly cognitive demanding flying situations [1]. Based on the Big Five Inventory (BFI) [2], several studies have shown that pilots tend to present a personality characterized by low neuroticism and high conscientiousness levels in comparison to the general population [3]. This specific combination of low neuroticism and high conscientiousness constitutes a personality style of impulse control defined as directed, which corresponds to individuals who have a clear sense of their own objectives and have the capacity to work to achieve them under complex conditions, overcoming obstacles and frustrations successfully [4]. According to a different classification presented in [5], the same combination of these neuroticism and conscientiousness levels is linked to entrepreneur or sceptic personalities, with the two differing in their extraversion level
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