Information overload as a stress factor among university students

Abstract

This article is based on the results of sociological research among students of provincial Russian universities. As stress symptoms in self-assessment we used behavioral, intellectual, physiological, and emotional manifestations of stress, which are traditionally used in psychology of stress. The authors revealed that the information overload among students correlates with stress symptoms, being especially apparent in the emotional and physiological components of stress. Although a body is capable of coping with the effects of information overload physiologically, the emotional manifestations of stress events occur more readily. Thus, today the basic risk for students is connected with information stress due to the growth of information overloads as excess information "consumption".