Physical properties of the human voice, particularly fundamental frequency (f0), have been linked to variety of physiological, behavioral, and affective outcomes that suggest it may be a promising new method of stress measurement. Initial findings suggest that adding audio recordings of vocal responses to stress assessment may be fruitful. Examination of vocal indices may be a lower cost, efficient method of capturing affective and physiological reactivity.

The Childhood Opportunity Index (COI) is a publicly available tool that evaluates neighborhood-level risks and resources for large metropolitan areas in the United States.

Chronic experience of stress over many months can be more elusive to detect and current self-report measures include lengthy life event questionnaires or domain-specific inventories. As chronic stress has known influences on health variables, a brief inventory would be valuable for use in clinical and research settings. We therefore developed and are evaluating the Chronic Stress Scale (CSS), a self-report screening questionnaire intended to capture the perceived experience of chronic stress over the past 6 months.

The Stress Measurement Network has recently developed measurements for disaster-related stress. See the new entry with the link below!

Using an optic sensor on the Samsung Galaxy S9 or S9+ this three week study obtains blood pressure and other physiologic parameters along with daily experiences of stress, emotions, health behaviors (sleeping, exercising), and other factors related to well-being. Participants also complete surveys regarding general health, early adversity, social networks, and personality/individual differences. This study has the potential to provide the largest dataset ever collected on blood pressure responses and stress and emotional experiences in daily life. To read more go to https://mybplab.com/.

Mobile phone sensing data: The Effortless Assessment of Risk States (E.A.R.S.) tool is a suite of programs installed on the user’s mobile phone that collect naturalistic behavior. Passive mobile phone sensing data, which is collected on an ongoing basis, may be able to examine the effect of stressors. It also has the advantage of measuring objective, naturalistic behavioral data. This tool was a part of the Obama White House’s Opportunity Project in August 2016, a technology development “sprint” to create new open digital tools to help communities.

Acute stress reactivity is currently measured in laboratory settings. Developing an online acute stress task that reliably evokes psychological and physiological arousal would enable the measurement of acute stress reactivity and recovery in larger samples as participants would not have to come in to the research lab. This summary describes a project that is attempting to develop an online acute stress task.

The Stress in Context (SIC) questionnaire is being developed to address limitations of existing measures of global perceived stress. Currently, the SIC is being validated by the Stress Measurement Network. This summary describes the purpose and current status of this new measure of perceived stress.

The Community Child Health Network Life Stress Interview is a brief 15-minute interview that was adapted form the UCLA Life Stress Interview (Hammen et al., 1987) and assesses four domains of chronic stress - neighborhood environment, family relationships, partner relationships, and co-parenting.