2025/03/19 by Luis Felipe Bortoletto, Giovani Grisotti Martins, Bianca Yukari Yamamoto +3 · 1 voice
Medicine · #Infrared Thermography in Medicine #Optical Imaging and Spectroscopy Techniques
paper · doi:10.1117/12.3046399
openalex publication_date 2025/03/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Stress is a physiological response that disturbs homeostasis in the presence of a physical or psychological threat. Although various paradigms have been proposed to assess the body’s reactivity to psychosocial stress, their reliability varies mostly due to insufficiently stressful stimulation. In addition, most of the existing paradigms aren’t suitable for functional brain imaging. In this study, we introduce a block-designed psychosocial stress-inducing protocol compatible with functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS). When validated in 40 healthy participants, we found that the stress-oriented condition elicited bilateral activation in the inferior frontal gyri, while the control condition was left-lateralized across the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC). The cardiovascular parameters and blood CO2 levels were significantly altered during stress compared to baseline and notably greater than those observed under controlled questions. Overall, our results suggest that the proposed protocol effectively induces psychosocial stress and can be reliably used with fNIRS to study the neural and physiological correlates of stress.