Does noise sensitivity or attentional capacity predict cardiovascular responses to distracting sound?

Abstract

Workplace noise may cause stress that has long-term implications for health. Employees in open-plan offices typically identify intermittently occurring background sounds as significant sources of stress, possibly because they distract attention away from intended tasks. Thus, individual differences in attention and noise sensitivity may explain individual differences in physiological responses to workplace noise. In previous research [Oliver, et al., in 176th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America (2018)], we reported results from a preliminary analysis of 19 participants’ affective and electrodermal responses to working in background noise that included intermittent environmental sounds. Electrodermal responses were used as a measure of distraction because they constitute a primary component of the physiological orienting response, a multi-component response reflecting exogenous capture of attention. Our results suggested that individuals who are more sensitive to noise experienced greater frustration with the primary task, but there was no relationship between frustration and distraction as indexed by electrodermal responses. Here, we present additional analyses of an expanded dataset, focusing on attentional and cardiovascular measures (heart rate and pulse volume amplitude) previously linked to cognitive demand and noise annoyance (Francis et al., 2016) and relate these results to an overall characterization of the auditory orienting response.