Help with Stress Paradigm

[joshcoulter8]

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Hi,

For an experiment I am running i need to induce stress in participants. However I need to repeat the stress condition 5 times, for 5 minutes per trial, and with a rest in between i.e. stress-rest-stress-rest.....

I have looked around online and am aware of quite a few stress inducing protocols e.g. TSST, MIST, MA, VG etc but can anyone tell me which would be best to use so as to prevent habituation? I need to be able to reliably induce stress, evidenced through HRV, each time.

Any help would be very much appreciated 🙂

 

[Ollie123]

Don't think you are likely to find a definitive answer to this question, particularly as there are many different "types" of stressor that may or may not map onto the goals of your study. I'm not an expert in the area, but haven't seen any studies that used repeat stressors in that short a window. Depending on your goals and how you are defining these things, would any effortful behavior be sufficient? If so, perhaps a series of math worksheets or something like that. You could assess for individual differences in reactivity and/or math aversion to see if this covaries with HRV. There's also always the option of pilot testing.

You also need to balance habituation (which likely suggests the need for a stronger manipulation) with recovery time. Five minutes is an awfully short window to allot for recovery, unless you are deliberately interested in how effects compound over repeated iterations so hopefully you were intending to have a short stressor with a longer recovery period.

 

[paramour]

Agreed with Ollie here.

Lots of different stressors that you *could* use depending upon what you're ultimately interested in. For example, the stressors I would use for a parenting study would be different than the stressors I use for some other study.

Regardless of the study, MOST stress studies I've seen end up conducting pilot studies to test their protocols.

(And 5 minutes really is a long time between each trial... unless there's something really super stressful going on there?)

 

[Ollie123]

(And 5 minutes really is a long time between each trial... unless there's something really super stressful going on there?)

Didn't agree with me on everything!

I think the length of the task is 5 minutes, not the time between trials but regardless would that really be considered a long time? I haven't done much with HRV myself, but the studies I've seen have looked at recovery times of 10 minutes, 20 minutes or even longer and still seen effects...

 

[paramour]

Didn't agree with me on everything!

I think the length of the task is 5 minutes, not the time between trials but regardless would that really be considered a long time? I haven't done much with HRV myself, but the studies I've seen have looked at recovery times of 10 minutes, 20 minutes or even longer and still seen effects...

This is what I get for simultaneously staring at live kitten cams, dissertating, and skimming posts. I didn't catch the 5-minute task. I just remember repeated 5-minute breaks, so I have no idea how I interpreted that information.

But, you are indeed correct. 5-minute rest really isn't that long, even for a "simple" task. And we have used 10-20 minute rest periods for more complex tasks or methodology where there was concern re: psych distress to boot. They wanted to check the duration of the effects in addition to verifying that folks were brought down, down, down before being amped up again.

So I STILL agree. So THERE!