Techniques for inducing stress: Problems and opportunities

This chapter introduces a range of techniques that are employed to assess how individuals respond to stress. It discusses commonly used paradigms that allow for the observation of individuals experiencing stress in naturalistic settings and overviews the techniques for inducing stress in controlled laboratory conditions. Naturalistic stressor studies offer an ecologically valid method for assessing the processes involved in stress responding; however, the ready application of these techniques is often limited by logistical issues and the specificity of potential participants. Passive coping tasks often lead to down-regulation of some stress-responding systems and as such may have more in common with physiological stressors such as cold pressor or receiving dental treatment which elicit parasympathetic cardiac activation. Stress is induced through the manipulation of the required workload, either by increasing the number of tasks the participant must attend to or by altering the difficulty of the tasks.