Stress in the laboratory and in daily life

Stress is believed to play a crucial causal role in the development and persistence of a large variety of mental and physical disorders. However, assessing stress remains challenging, both in experimental and ambulatory settings. There is a growing need for an integrative approach, assessing and relating the subjective, endocrine, and autonomic stress response. Combined with Experience Sampling Methodology, developments in wearable technology enable accurate assessment of the physiological stress response in daily life. The CCP, together with GRASP, is setting up a study that assesses the subjective, autonomic, and endocrine stress response in daily life and associates it with the response to an experimental stress task. A second project that is already ongoing involves an fMRI study on stress reactivity in individuals at high-risk for developing psychosis.