Jean-François Stich

Email stress: Towards a new understanding of its causes and impacts

Email is a source of ambivalence for its users, who report feeling divided between the opportunities for productivity gains it offers and threats of overload it poses. This conceptual article seeks to shed light on how email use (for both receiving and sending correspondence) generates perceptions of both threat (stress or distress) and challenge (eustress). It summarizes the main ideas of previous research in a transactional model of email stress distinguishing the experiences of senders from those of receivers and, in so doing, opens new avenues for future empirical research and for more stimulating and less negative use of this communication tool.