Using a ‘robot audience’ to induce acute stress [new study]

Psychology researchers : are you looking for a novel way to illicit an acute stress response in your experimental participants? If so, a new paper in the journal Computers in Human Behavior (Volume 99, October 2019, Pages 76-85) may provide ideas. A research team from the University of Bath and Bournemouth University, UK, have devised a new way to cause stress. It involves a 10-min ‘mock interview’ (and mathematics task) held in front of an ‘audience’ of robots.

“Until now, a non-human robot audience has not been used in a social stress testing paradigm.”

– say the team. Their open-access paper can be read in full here : ‘Use of a non-human robot audience to induce stress reactivity in human participants’

An 11 minute video of the robot audience can be found here (.mp4 format) [Advisory : Viewing may cause increases in salivary cortisol]

https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S0747563219301943-mmc1.mp4

Research research by Martin Gardiner