Evaluating the Twente Intervention and Interaction Machine to measure psychological, behavioural and physiological components of the stress response in students.
Internal/external: Internal
How many students? 1
Supervision: Individually
Includes data collection? Yes
Type of research: Quantitative – experience sampling
Number of ECTS? 15 ECTS
Research assignment
The experience of stress is an inherent aspect of daily-life. Certain aspects of daily life (events perceived as (strong) stressors) give a clear stress response. This stress response has multiple aspects. These aspects can be defined as cognitive (certain negative thoughts, (Littman et al., 2006), emotions (certain feelings labelled as anxious, (Watson & Clark, 1988), behavior (decline in activity levels, (Difrancesco et al., 2022) and physiological (an increase in heart rate, (van Lier et al., 2020). When researching stress responses in daily life you need appropriate methods and technology. Ideally these allow both active (e.g. asking someone how they feel) and passive (e.g. measuring the heart rate with a smartwatch) sensing. For this bachelor thesis you will evaluate the Twente Intervention and Interaction Machine (TIIM) that can measure various aspects of the daily life stress response. See https://www.utwente.nl/en/bmslab/.
You will set-up and evaluate the possibilities to create, run and do a basic explorative analysis (descriptive statistics and visualizations) of a two week daily life study in which you try to measure as many aspects of the stress response with the TIIM as possible trying out the Apple Health Kit /Google Fit integration to acquire both active and passive sensing employing best practices for Experience Sampling (Myin-Germeys & Kuppens, 2021)
. In the end you will write a clear conclusion on the appropriateness of the TIIM as a tool to be used for major research projects into daily life stress (e.g. https://stress-in-action.nl/)
Who do we look for?
An enthusiastic student interested in stress in daily life and evaluating appropriate tools for testing the multicomponent nature of the stress response in students.
Difrancesco, S., Penninx, B. W. J. H., Merikangas, K. R., van Hemert, A. M., Riese, H., & Lamers, F. (2022). Within-day bidirectional associations between physical activity and affect: A real-time ambulatory study in persons with and without depressive and anxiety disorders. Depression and Anxiety. https://doi.org/10.1002/DA.23298
Littman, A. J., White, E., Satia, J. A., Bowen, D. J., & Kristal, A. R. (2006). Reliability and validity of 2 single-item measures of psychosocial stress. Epidemiology, 17(4), 398–403. https://doi.org/10.1097/01.EDE.0000219721.89552.51
Myin-Germeys, I., & Kuppens, P. (Eds.). (2021). The open handbook of experience sampling methodology: A step-by-step guide to designing, conducting, and analyzing ESM studies. Center for Research on Experience Sampling and Ambulatory Methods Leuven. https://www.kuleuven.be/samenwerking/real/real-book/index.htm
van Lier, H. G., Pieterse, M. E., Garde, A., Postel, M. G., de Haan, H. A., Vollenbroek-Hutten, M. M. R., Schraagen, J. M., & Noordzij, M. L. (2020). A standardized validity assessment protocol for physiological signals from wearable technology: Methodological underpinnings and an application to the E4 biosensor. Behavior Research Methods, 52(2). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-019-01263-9
Watson, D., & Clark, L. A. (1988). Development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative affect: The PANAS scales. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54(6), 1063–1070. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.54.6.1063