Emotional Impact of a Task and its Setting on Work Performance of Screeners and Nonscreeners

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Abstract
This study explored desire to work at a task in a situation as a function of situational pleasantness, situational arousing quality, task pleasantness, and task arousing quality. The hypotheses which were based on a general theory of environmental psychology accounted for a major portion of the results. These showed that (1) the pleasantness of a task and/or situation is a direct correlate of desire to work, (2) the arousing quality of any situation-task combination is inversely related to the desire to work, and (3) desire to work is not affected by the arousing quality of a situation-task combination when that combination is pleasant, and decreases with arousing quality of a situation-task combination when that combination is either neutral (in terms of pleasantness) or unpleasant. An individual difference measure of stimulus screening was employed to assess characteristic differences in automatic screening of irrelevant stimuli and rapid habituation to distracting stimuli. Nonscreeners who are generally more arousable reported a lower desire to work than screeners. Further, as predicted, nonscreeners, compared with screeners, reported a greater desire to work at pleasant situation-task combinations. However, compared with screeners, they reported less desire to work at neutral (in terms of pleasantness) or unpleasant tasks.

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