Habituation of the electrodermal response – A biological correlate of resilience?

Abstract

Current approaches to quantifying resilience make extensive use of self-reported data. Problematically, this type of scales is plagued by response distortions–both deliberate and unintentional, particularly in occupational populations. The aim of the current study was to develop an objective index of resilience. The study was conducted in 30 young healthy adults. Following completion of the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC) and Depression/Anxiety/Stress Scale (DASS), they were subjected to a series of 15 acoustic startle stimuli (95 dB, 50 ms) presented at random intervals, with respiration, skin conductance and ECG recorded. As expected, resilience (CD-RISC) significantly and negatively correlated with all three DASS subscales–Depression (r = -0.66, p<0.0001), Anxiety (r = -0.50, p<0.005) and Stress (r = -0.48, p<0.005). Acoustic stimuli consistently provoked transient skin conductance (SC) responses, with SC slopes indexing response habituation. This slope significantly and positively correlated with DASS-Depression (r = 0.59, p<0.005), DASS-Anxiety (r = 0.35, p<0.05) and DASS-Total (r = 0.50, p<0.005) scores, and negatively with resilience score (r = -0.47; p = 0.006), indicating that high-resilience individuals are characterized by steeper habituation slopes compared to low-resilience individuals. Our key finding of the connection between habituation of the skin conductance responses to repeated acoustic startle stimulus and resilience-related psychometric constructs suggests that response habituation paradigm has the potential to characterize important attributes of cognitive fitness and well-being–such as depression, anxiety and resilience. With steep negative slopes reflecting faster habituation, lower depression/anxiety and higher resilience, and slower or no habituation characterizing less resilient individuals, this protocol may offer a distortion-free method for objective assessment and monitoring of psychological resilience.

Is higher resilience predictive of lower stress and better mental health among corporate executives?

“…In addition to overall comparisons, we also included pairwise comparisons using the same statistical tests noted above. The association between the noncategorized CD-RISC score with the LASA and PSS scores was quantified with Pearson correlations [38]. Adjusted associations between CD-RISC category (X) and the overall LASA score (Y) were assessed with a linear regression model, adjusting for the following covariates: age, education, gender, marital status (married vs unmarried), income, current meditator status, and race (white vs nonwhite).…”

Effects of Dynamic Resilience on the Reactivity of Vagally Mediated Heart Rate Variability

“…There is a possibility that the additional physiological equipment and external factors contributed to task disengagements and dynamic resilience declines due to physical discomfort. Moreover, the acoustic startle stimuli are unlikely to affect vmHRV as the task effects are more likely to mask physiological startle responses (Walker et al, 2019 ). Furthermore, large quantities of demographics pertaining to participants' physiology and lifestyle factors are desired to provide adequate descriptions of the sample examined.…”

“…Participants were recruited via soft (e.g., social media) and hard (e.g., paper-flyers) copy advertisement. Potential participants were notified of the exclusion criteria, such as age restrictions (18–60), right hand dominant (to reduce systematic errors), being physically healthy (e.g., no known cardiovascular disease), and no psychopathological disorders; for example, (e.g., post-traumatic stress disorder) (Walker et al, 2019 ). In total, 60 eligible right-handed participants (37 male and 23 female), aged between 20 and 58 years ( M = 30.57, S.D = 9.25), were recruited to participate in the current experiment.…”

“…In accord with dynamic resilience theory, the history of task performance plays a prominent role in moderating the status of one's dynamic resilience (Hill et al, 2018b ). Hence, the intention for the working baseline was to provide a period to build a history of task performance and induce a standardized mental set across participants (Walker et al, 2019 ). The high task difficulty stress periods were purposed with evoking experiences of task stress and failures for participants to overcome.…”

Political psychophysiology

“…To our knowledge, there is no set length of time at which habituation will occur or become a limiting obstacle in research designs. Habituation itself is influenced by individual differences; for example, it is highly correlated with psychological resiliency and other individual differences (see Walker et al, 2019).…”