When it comes to business travel there's something stressful in the air For millions of business travelers, flying is no picnic. It is a stressful ordeal that has become an integral part of their working lives, even as airlines report record passenger loads and stories of passengers blowing their fuses on flights proliferate. But air travel doesn't necessarily have to be stressful, according to University of Washington psychologists who have developed a new scale to measure air travel stress. The researchers, Jonathan Bricker, a UW doctoral student, and psychology professor Irwin Sarason, reported in a presentation at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Society that men and women experience air travel stress in different ways. The results suggest an interaction of personal factors, such as anxiety and anger, as well as situational factors, such as travel frequency to different work sites.
Anxious women traveling to unfamiliar destinations experience a high level of air-travel stress.
By contrast, anxious women traveling to familiar destinations experienced a moderate level of stress. Men's result were similar, except that men who were anger prone were more likely to have air-travel stress. When they were going to a new destination these women worried more, for example about their personal safety, and were concerned by such things as new procedures to get in and out of an airport, making a connecting flight or wondering whether their plane will be delayed. Going to a new place almost doubled the amount of stress for women. For men, the combination of anger, anxiety and travel to unfamiliar destinations provoked stress.