ANR DAY STRESS

Stress, broadly defined as the response of the organism to challenging conditions, is central to life adaptation. However, stress may also have negative consequences in many domains (e.g., academic success, decision making, health). DAY-STRESS is anchored in a social psychology and neurophysiology approach of stress. We will examine the stress responses of people when they perform a task in the presence of others. This social stressor may be associated with either adaptive or maladaptive responses. Indeed, it may have positive effects on performance on well-learned tasks, but negative effects on unlearned tasks, a phenomenon called social-facilitation-and-impairment (SFI) effects. Although much has been learnt about these effects, scientific knowledge has been developed almost exclusively in laboratory experiments. Therefore, the external validity of these results remains an open question, which seems particularly important to address within the current replicability crisis in science. The first goal of DAY-STRESS will be to provide a conceptual replication of SFI effects based on triangulation (the use of different methods to test the same question), by examining these effects in a laboratory experiment as well as in a daily-life longitudinal study, during which data will be collected during a whole day once a month during one year. This methodological approach will be made possible thanks to the use of an innovative physiological index model developed by the team and based on artificial intelligence, which is able to accurately measure stress not only in the lab but also in daily life. This index relies on the fusion of multiple physiological features (respiratory, cardiac and skin conductance parameters) calculated from signals captured by a connected watch and chest belt. The second goal of DAY-STRESS will be to better understand SFI processes, by examining its two dominant explanations (related to arousal and attention) which have been mostly examined separately so far. To do so, we will investigate these two processes simultaneously and continuously during task execution, by coupling measures at the physiological, subjective and neuromuscular level (EEG, EOG, EMG). These questions will be examined in the domain of rifle-shooting. This task provides a theoretical framework particularly relevant to investigate SFI effects, because it is performed in an immobile position, thus ensuring some experimental control even in ecological studies. In addition, it is usually performed in the presence of a public, bringing thus some ecological validity to the study of SFI effects. Our main hypothesis is that the effect of social presence on shooting performance will be moderated by task expertise: for high-level experts, performance will be facilitated by social presence; for low-level experts, performance will be debilitated. Hypotheses with regard to mediation are more exploratory: we expect SFI effects to be mediated by arousal and/or attentional processes. With respect to the physiological stress index model, it should be enriched and strengthened by the identification of new combinations of physiological characteristics which are both more stress specific and accessible in various real-life conditions and on a longitudinal basis. To test these questions, DAY-STRESS will involve an interdisciplinary team composed of researchers in sports sciences (social psychology, neurosciences), in neurophysiology, and in artificial intelligence.

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