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Changes in respiration during emotional stress

Abstract:

In this work, we analyze changes in respiration during emotional stress induced by a modification of the Trier Social Stress Test. The following stages in the test were analyzed: the pre-relaxing stage, the story telling stage, the anticipation of stress and the video exposition stage. Respiration signal is recorded during the whole test using a thoracic band. Power spectral density (PSD) of respiration is computed in running windows using a modification of Welch periodogram in which sufficiently peaked spectra are averaged. Then, respiratory frequency (FR) is estimated from the peaked-conditioned averaged spectra. Results show that respiratory rate is significantly (p < 0.05 according to the Friedman test) higher, while a measure of spectral peakness and the percentage of PSD used to compute (FR) is lower during stress stages than during relax. These results suggest that the respiration-related parameters have potential discrimination power for stress level assessment.