Does Baseline Stress Affect Electrodermal Activity? A Serious-Game-Based Pilot Study

Giulia Masi, Gianluca Amprimo, Irene Rechichi, Claudia Ferraris, Gabriella Olmo

Abstract: Stress management is crucial for health and well being. Electrodermal activity (EDA) is a promising physiological marker for studying stress. While the detection of stress response to stimuli in the short term using EDA is well-studied, the impact of baseline stress (i.e. averaged daily life stress perceived on the long period) on EDA remains unexplored. This study combines a serious game for stress induction, with simultaneous EDA recording to investigate the relation between baseline stress and the EDA response obtained during gameplay. In a pilot study involving 25 university students, EDA features had moderate correlation (Spearman’s ρs ≥0.4, p-value <0.05) with stress perceived by the subject in the previous month and differed significantly between low and moderate baseline stress groups. As a further analysis, shallow learning models trained on EDA features to recognize these two groups achieved ≥ 90.0% accuracy and F1-score in a Leave-One-Subject-Out validation, supporting the initial hypothesis that baseline stress directly affects subjects’ EDA.