Towards the Development of Speech-Based Measures of Stress Response in Individuals

Archna Bhatia, Toshiya Miyatsu, Peter Pirolli


Abstract
Psychological and physiological stress in the environment can induce a different stress response in different individuals. Given the causal relationship between stress, mental health, and psychopathologies, as well as its impact on individuals’ executive functioning and performance, identifying the extent of stress response in individuals can be useful for providing targeted support to those who are in need. In this paper, we identify and validate features in speech that can be used as indicators of stress response in individuals to develop speech-based measures of stress response. We evaluate effectiveness of two types of tasks used for collecting speech samples in developing stress response measures, namely Read Speech Task and Open-Ended Question Task. Participants completed these tasks, along with the verbal fluency task (an established measure of executive functioning) before and after clinically validated stress induction to see if the changes in the speech-based features are associated with the stress-induced decline in executive functioning. Further, we supplement our analyses with an extensive, external assessment of the individuals’ stress tolerance in the real life to validate the usefulness of the speech-based measures in predicting meaningful outcomes outside of the experimental setting.
Anthology ID:
2021.clpsych-1.21
Volume:
Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology: Improving Access
Month:
June
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Nazli Goharian, Philip Resnik, Andrew Yates, Molly Ireland, Kate Niederhoffer, Rebecca Resnik
Venue:
CLPsych
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
192–203
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.clpsych-1.21
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.clpsych-1.21
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Archna Bhatia, Toshiya Miyatsu, and Peter Pirolli. 2021. Towards the Development of Speech-Based Measures of Stress Response in Individuals. In Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology: Improving Access, pages 192–203, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards the Development of Speech-Based Measures of Stress Response in Individuals (Bhatia et al., CLPsych 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.clpsych-1.21.pdf