Table 13.

Guidelines for possible individual (S_1 and 2) and hardware (S_3 and 4) factors influencing acute stress.

ID_factor Evidence level	Individual	Description	Guidelines
S_1 VII	Age	Older workers appear more resilient to work-related stress (Hsu, 2019) Stress's negative impacts on memory performance are lower in older people (Hidalgo et al., 2019), although this doesn't reveal at the meta-analytic level (Shields et al., 2017). Similarly, older people seem less impacted by acute psychosocial stress (Vallejo et al., 2021) Stressful work is linked to slightly more sickness absence among older workers (Götz et al., 2018) Older workers or those with longer professional have greater difficulties with the increase of technological complexity for executing tasks (techno-complexity) (Marchiori et al., 2019)	Consider that younger workers could be more sensitive to induced stressors in VR working tasks (Hsu, 2019). Consider attributing fewer complex tasks or less socially stressful tasks to younger workers Older workers could be more susceptible to techno-stress (see also S_3 and S_4) (Marchiori et al., 2019). Consider attributing fewer complex tasks in VR to them
S_2 II	Body Mass Index (BMI)	A weak association between work stress (occupational level) and high BMI exists (Kouvonen et al., 2005; Magnusson Hanson et al., 2017). However, there are contradictory results (Myers et al., 2021) Obesogenic behaviors seem to induce higher perceived stress (Barrington, 2012) Psychosocial stress is positively associated with body mass index gain (Harding et al., 2014)	Consider that people with high BMI could be more sensitive to acute stress (Barrington, 2012; Harding et al., 2014)
S_3 VII	Techno-complexity	Techno-complexity defines the inherent quality of an ITC, which drives employees to feel that their computer skills are inadequate. Symptomology is poor concentration, irritability, memory disturbances as well as exhaustion. Since VR at the workplace is new for most workers, it is reasonable to presume it could lead to techno-complexity stress. Workers will have to constantly learn how to use this ICT (Tarafdar et al., 2019). But coping with VR induced Techno-complexity results in stress responses at the occupational level (Dragano and Lunau, 2020; Tarafdar et al., 2020; Weinert et al., 2020)	Train workers correctly to in-VR tasks, virtual environment's interactions, and interfaces to prevent techno-complexity (Tarafdar et al., 2019)
S_4 VI	Techno-overload	Techno-overload defines “simultaneous, different streams of information that increase the pace and volume of work” (Atanasoff and Venable, 2017). Inside this techno-overload, the “information overload” dimension (Nisafani et al., 2020) could apply in the context of data analyses in VR. Since VR is new for most workers and implies side effects, we can predict a high demand psychologically and physiologically (Atanasoff and Venable, 2017; Zhao et al., 2020)	Adapt information streams to lower-down techno-overload and consider cybersickness, visual fatigue, and muscle fatigue to make more difficult application tools, thus, inducing stress (Atanasoff and Venable, 2017; Zhao et al., 2020)