stress+

stress+ is a browser-based web application for the remote induction of acute psychosocial stress. It was developed to address a central limitation of established laboratory protocols such as the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST): while these paradigms are highly effective, they are also personnel-intensive, difficult to scale, and hard to repeat outside controlled in-person settings.

The core idea of stress+ is to let researchers build customizable stress-induction pipelines that can be distributed via a simple web link. Instead of implementing only a single fixed protocol, the system provides a modular framework in which different stress-induction and amplification elements can be combined depending on the study design. This makes the platform suitable both for exploratory prototyping and for more standardized experimental workflows.

The application includes a range of task modules inspired by established stress paradigms, including mental arithmetic, serial subtraction, interview tasks, several Stroop variants, N-back, and mental rotation. These screens can be combined with additional social-evaluative and uncontrollability overlays such as performance feedback, screen freeze, simulated heart-rate feedback, webcam-based observation, chatbot interactions, and jury videos. Together, these components are intended to recreate key mechanisms of psychosocial stress exposure in a remote digital setting.

From a technical perspective, stress+ is implemented as a web application with a dedicated admin interface for researchers and a separate execution interface for study participants. Researchers can create, edit, share, export, and re-import pipelines, while participant metadata and task performance can be saved for later analysis. The system was designed as an extensible framework so that new task and overlay modules can be added with relatively little effort.

More broadly, this project is part of my work on transferring stress research from tightly controlled laboratory environments into more scalable and ecologically valid real-world settings. A central next step is the empirical validation of stress+ against established acute stress protocols using markers such as salivary cortisol, heart rate, heart rate variability, and self-reported stress and threat.