Department of Biobehavioral Health, The Pennsylvania State University.
Department of Psychological Sciences, University of California, Merced.
Perspect Psychol Sci. 2023 Jan;18(1):110-124. doi: 10.1177/17456916221082108. Epub 2022 Jul 29.
Repeated assessments in everyday life enables collecting ecologically valid data on dynamic, within-persons processes. These methods have widespread utility and application and have been extensively used for the study of stressors and stress responses. Enhanced conceptual sophistication of characterizing intraindividual stress responses in everyday life would help advance the field. This article provides a pragmatic overview of approaches, opportunities, and challenges when intensive ambulatory methods are applied to study everyday stress responses in "real time." We distinguish between three stress-response components (i.e., reactivity, recovery, and pileup) and focus on several fundamental questions: (a) What is the appropriate stress-free resting state (or "baseline") for an individual in everyday life? (b) How does one index the magnitude of the initial response to a stressor (reactivity)? (c) Following a stressor, how can recovery be identified (e.g., when the stress response has completed)? and (d) Because stressors may not occur in isolation, how can one capture the temporal clustering of stressors and/or stress responses (pileup)? We also present initial ideas on applying this approach to intervention research. Although we focus on stress responses, these issues may inform many other dynamic intraindividual constructs and behaviors (e.g., physical activity, physiological processes, other subjective states) captured in ambulatory assessment.
在日常生活中进行反复评估可以收集关于动态个体内过程的具有生态效度的数据。这些方法具有广泛的实用性和适用性，并已广泛用于应激源和应激反应的研究。增强对日常生活中个体内应激反应特征的概念理解将有助于推动该领域的发展。本文提供了一种实用的概述，介绍了在“实时”研究日常生活应激反应时应用密集型动态评估方法的方法、机会和挑战。我们区分了三个应激反应成分（即反应性、恢复和累积），并重点关注了几个基本问题：（a）在日常生活中，个体的适当无应激静息状态（或“基线”）是什么？（b）如何衡量个体对应激源的初始反应幅度（反应性）？（c）在应激源之后，如何识别恢复（例如，当应激反应完成时）？（d）由于应激源不会孤立发生，如何捕捉应激源和/或应激反应的时间聚类（累积）？我们还提出了将这种方法应用于干预研究的初步想法。尽管我们专注于应激反应，但这些问题可能会影响动态个体内其他构造和行为（例如，体力活动、生理过程、其他主观状态）的评估。
