The Role of Gender in Teachers’ Perceived Stress and Heart Rate

Abstract

Gender differences in cardiovascular variables in response to laboratory stressors have been described. In real situations, although occupational stress is considered one of the major causes of cardiovascular diseases, there are few studies that follow a psychophysiological approach, such as in a work context. In these settings, excessive environmental demands might produce nonadaptive emotional responses, depending on the way people perceive their work settings. Concretely, there are few published studies that take into account the changes of perceived stress (PS) and/or heart rate (HR) considering the ecological moment. Thus, our interest was to study the changes of both variables during two working days (WDs). Moreover, we considered the effect of gender as a modulator of these variables. For this purpose, 35 full-time school teachers participated in the research. PS was measured by means of a self-report and HR was continuously recorded during the WD at the beginning and end of an academic year. Results showed changes in HR during the WD and higher PS levels when teachers were with students on both WDs. Furthermore, there were increases in both variables at the end of the academic year. In spite of the similar responses in both variables studied, HR and PS did not correlate significantly. We conclude that our data, taken from a real work setting, show that HR and PS responses to a WD in teachers seems to be different, showing some gender differences.