Smartphone Photoplethysmography Pulse Rate Covaries With Stress and Anxiety During a Digital Acute Social Stressor

Heart rate is a transdiagnostic correlate of affective states and the stress diathesis model of health. Although most psychophysiological research has been conducted in laboratory environments, recent technological advances have provided the opportunity to index pulse rate dynamics in real-world environments with commercially available mobile health and wearable photoplethysmography (PPG) sensors that allow for improved ecologically validity of psychophysiological research. Unfortunately, adoption of wearable devices is unevenly distributed across important demographic characteristics, including socioeconomic status, education, and age, making it difficult to collect pulse rate dynamics in diverse populations. Therefore, there is a need to democratize mobile health PPG research by harnessing more widely adopted smartphone-based PPG to both promote inclusivity and examine whether smartphone-based PPG can predict concurrent affective states.

In the current preregistered study with open data and code, we examined the covariation of smartphone-based PPG and self-reported stress and anxiety during an online variant of the Trier Social Stress Test, as well as prospective relationships between PPG and future perceptions of stress and anxiety in a sample of 102 university students.

Smartphone-based PPG significantly covaries with self-reported stress and anxiety during acute digital social stressors. PPG pulse rate was significantly associated with concurrent self-reported stress and anxiety ( b = 0.44, p = .018) as well as prospective stress and anxiety at the subsequent time points, although the strength of this association diminished the farther away pulse rate got from self-reported stress and anxiety (lag 1 model: b = 0.42, p = .024; lag 2 model: b = 0.38, p = .044).

These findings indicate that PPG provides a proximal measure of the physiological correlates of stress and anxiety. Smartphone-based PPG can be used as an inclusive method for diverse populations to index pulse rate in remote digital study designs.