Feasibility Study of Skin Conductance Response for Quantifying Individual Dynamic Resilience

Habituation responses to startle stimuli have been linked to individuals' resilience assessment. Derived from skin conductance levels (SCL), individuals' who elicit quicker habituation to startle stimuli typically report possessing higher trait resilience. However, this link has not yet been evaluated in the context of individuals' dynamic resilience. This study examines whether the habituation of skin conductance response (SCR) could be used as a predictive measure for classifying individuals into high, moderate and low dynamic resilience groups. A dynamic decision-making task was paired with an acoustic startle paradigm, in which 53 participants were analyzed while being subjected to acoustic startle stimuli during the task. SCL of the participants were continuously recorded during the 24-minute trials. On the contrary to previous results in the literature supporting a link between skin conductance levels and trait resilience, current results did not show a solid predictive power toward quantification of dynamic resilience. However, the results act as a first step and open the way for further research to consider testing SCL measures as predictors of dynamic resilience in more ecological task environments than in controlled laboratory settings. These more ecological task environments may yield more SCL sensitivity for dynamic resilience measurement, as individuals will experience more naturally fluctuating task load and be required to activate various combinations of cognitive functions to cope with the task stressors.