Inducing and Recording Acute Stress Responses on a Large Scale With the Digital Stress Test (DST): Development and...

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Psychophysiology
• Digital Health

Background:

• Standardized stress induction experiments provide valuable insights but are often limited to laboratory settings, hindering scalability and real-world application.
• Existing protocols are labor-intensive and cannot be easily adapted for large cohorts or daily life scenarios.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a scalable digital tool for standardized induction and recording of acute stress responses outside laboratory settings.
• To enable stress assessment without direct experimenter contact, facilitating large-scale data collection.

Main Methods:

• Developed the Digital Stress Test (DST) based on established stress protocols.
• Evaluated DST feasibility and stress induction in a large web-based study with 284 participants using smartphones.
• Compared affective responses and stress-related feelings with a control group and historical Trier Social Stress Test data.

Main Results:

• DST participants reported significantly higher perceived stress levels than the control group.
• The increase in negative affect within the DST was comparable in effect size to that observed in classic Trier Social Stress Test experiments.

Conclusions:

• A digital stress paradigm administered via smartphone enables standardized, large-scale stress induction and multimodal data collection.
• Further development and validation of the DST, including physiological markers, are planned.