Deep Learning Approaches for Stress Detection: A Survey

Maria Kyrou, Ioannis Kompatsiaris, Panagiotis C. Petrantonakis

Published: 2025, Last Modified: 25 Mar 2026IEEE Trans. Affect. Comput. 2025EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY-SA 4.0
Abstract: Stress has a severe impact on individuals irrespective of age, sex, work, or background. The reliable development of stress detection techniques enhances the social, educational, physical, economic, and professional quality of life, preventing chronic stress and proposing alleviation strategies. Research studies examine psychological, cognitive, behavioral, and physiological reactions to identify stress adequately. Deep Learning (DL) has received significant attention in recent years as it deals with high-dimensional, heterogeneous data and automatically learns representative features. This paper presents a survey on stress detection with recent DL approaches, leveraging data from all possible sources (physiological, speech, facial expressions, gestures, and social media content). The methodological outlines, the best results, and the main contributions of each study are discussed. We also describe publicly available datasets used by several of the presented works. Finally, we emphasize various open issues within the field of research and highlight key directions for future work.
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