VoStress – Voice-based Detection of Acute Psychosocial Stress

Current stress assessment methods include self-reports and biomarkers which are evaluated in often complex, laboratory procedures. Due to that investigating new indicators for acute stress is crucial for the development of automatic stress detection systems. A promising extension might be provided by investigating speech, which has been shown to be affected by negative emotions and threatening situations. For that reason, we extracted verbal acoustics from audio data collected during a study where N=21 participants underwent the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST), the gold standard for laboratory stress induction, and a stress-free control condition (friendly-TSST) while concurrently collecting cortisol via saliva samples to assess the biological response to stress. Our results show that acute stress leads to significant (p < 0.05) alterations of acoustic features. A stepwise backward multiple linear regression model explained 58.8 % of the variance of the maximum cortisol increase. In addition to that, we performed classification experiments that distinguished stress from non-stress situations with an accuracy of 80.0 ± 12.7 %. While further research is needed to validate our approach, we are convinced that the information extracted from speech can be a valuable indicator for automatic stress detection systems and can even predict the biological response to stress situations.