"Expanding the Frontiers of Stress Spillover and Recovery Research"

A School of Psychology Colloquium Lecture by Dr. Charles Calderwood, PhD, Assistant Professor, Virginia Tech

Abstract

"Efforts to recover from daily work stress can be impaired when employees experience greater spillover of work stress to off-job time, which can influence employee health, well-being, and performance. In this talk, I present research demonstrating unique insights that can be gained when expanding the study of stress spillover and recovery beyond the occupational, temporal, and methodological boundaries that have historically characterized this research area. Empirical work to be discussed will highlight employment contexts (e.g., working students), temporal windows (e.g., the commute between work and home), and methodological approaches (e.g., objective behavior monitoring) that have been under-emphasized in past stress spillover and recovery research. I will conclude with a discussion of opportunities and challenges in expanding the scope of stress spillover and recovery research to these novel contexts and applications."

Reception will follow the lecture.

About the Speaker

Dr. Calderwood is an assistant professor of industrial and organizational psychology in the Department of Psychology, part of the Virginia Tech College of Science. Prior to coming to Virginia Tech, Dr. Calderwood was an assistant professor of psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Tulane University in 2006, and his master’s and doctoral degrees from Georgia Tech in 2009 and 2012, respectively, all in psychology.

Dr. Calderwood runs the Work Stress and Recovery lab at Virginia Tech, where his research focuses on investigating how employees perceive, respond to, and recover from work stress.

He also looks at how individual and work characteristics contribute to the integration of work with other areas of life, with a recent emphasis on understanding how supervisors influence their subordinates’ efforts to recover from work stress. He also looks at the role of information and communication technology devices, such as smartphones and laptops, etc., in employee stress and recovery processes.