Stressful First Impressions in Job Interviews

Stress can impact many aspects of our lives, such as the way we interact and work with others, or the first impressions that we make. In the past, stress has most commonly been assessed through selfreported questionnaires; however, advancements in wearable technology have enabled the measurement of physiological symptoms of stress in an unobtrusive manner. Using a dataset of job interviews, we investigate whether first impressions of stress (from annotations) are equivalent to physiological measurements of electrodermal activity (EDA). We examine the use of automatically extracted nonverbal cues, stemming from both the visual and audio modalities, as well as EDA stress measurements for the inference of stress impressions obtained from manual annotations. Stress impressions were found to be significantly negatively correlated with hireability ratings (i.e., individuals who were perceived to be more stressed were more likely to obtain lower hireability scores). The analysis revealed a significant relationship between audio and visual features but low predictability, while no significant effects were found for the EDA features. While some nonverbal cues were more clearly related to stress, the physiological cues were less reliable and warrant further investigation into the use of wearable sensors for stress detection.