Author, as appears in the article.: Vallès-Català T; Pedret A; Ribes D; Medina D; Traveria M

Department: Psicologia Medicina i Cirurgia

URV's Author/s: Pedret Figuerola, Anna / Ribes Fortanet, Diana

Abstract: © 2020 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. Objective: To study how stress affects the performance of student pilots under highly demanding conditions, during flight simulator sessions. Background: Pilots usually suffer stress under highly demanding conditions. This can affect performance to such an extent that the human factor is the main cause of aviation accidents. Stress has not been studied recently in student pilots. Method: We used a wristband to record in real-time the Electrodermal Activity (EDA, a reliable indicator of stress) of student pilots during several flight simulator sessions. Experienced flight instructors graded their performance during these flights. The sessions were split into different tasks to focus only on performance and EDA in Highly Demanding Tasks (HDTs). Results: We found that students have higher EDA when correctly performing an HDT. Furthermore, we observed low EDA in students who perform well on the session as a whole but perform poorly on one particular HDT. Conclusion: The study indicates that high levels of stress are related to high performance at high levels of demand. We also observe that students (although they may perform well on the session as a whole) poorly performed a highly demanding task, during which they showed low levels of stress. We suggest that this could be due to fatigue, a lack of motivation, level of skills, or even overconfidence, all of which are variables that should be assessed in future work.

Thematic Areas: Psychology, applied Education Computer science applications Ciencias sociales Applied psychology Aerospace engineering

licence for use: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/

Author's mail: diana.ribes@urv.cat anna.pedret@urv.cat

Author identifier: 0000-0002-5327-932X

Record's date: 2023-02-23

Papper version: info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersion

Link to the original source: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/24721840.2020.1841564?needAccess=true

Licence document URL: http://repositori.urv.cat/ca/proteccio-de-dades/

Papper original source: International Journal Of Aerospace Psychology. (1): 43-55

APA: Vallès-Català T; Pedret A; Ribes D; Medina D; Traveria M (2021). Effects of Stress on Performance during Highly Demanding Tasks in Student Pilots. International Journal Of Aerospace Psychology, (1), 43-55. DOI: 10.1080/24721840.2020.1841564

Article's DOI: 10.1080/24721840.2020.1841564

Entity: Universitat Rovira i Virgili

Journal publication year: 2021

Publication Type: Journal Publications