Computer Breakdown as a Stress Factor during Task Completion under Time Pressure: Identifying Gender Differences Based on Skin Conductance

Figure 1

Collection and analysis of EDA data. Notes: The upper part of Figure 1 illustrates the stimulus, the error message which popped up 2.5 minutes after a participant’s first click in the online shop. All stimulus material was presented in German. The error message contains the following text (literal translation): “Critical Error! Fatal exception error! Error code 11404: The ApacheWeb server is not available. Contact your administrator or restart Apache!” It was not possible for subjects to click away the error message, because the screen view was frozen. Time intervals that were used for data analyses are illustrated in gray background color, namely, 60 seconds before stimulus onset (prestressor phase) and 3 seconds after stimulus onset (poststressor phase). Changes in electrodermal activity (EDA) in response to discrete events can be expected within a time interval of 3 seconds [33].