An approach to an acute emotional stress reference scale.

INTRODUCTION: The clinical diagnosis aims to identify the degree of affectation of the psycho-physical state of the patient as a guide to therapeutic intervention. In stress, the lack of a measurement tool based on a reference makes it difficult to quantitatively assess this degree of affectation.

AIM: To define and perform a primary assessment of a standard reference in order to measure acute emotional stress from the markers identified as indicators of the degree.

SUBJECTS AND METHODS: Psychometric tests and biochemical variables are, in general, the most accepted stress measurements by the scientific community. Each one of them probably responds to different and complementary processes related to the reaction to a stress stimulus. The reference that is proposed is a weighted mean of these indicators by assigning them relative weights in accordance with a principal components analysis.

RESULTS: An experimental study was conducted on 40 healthy young people subjected to the psychosocial stress stimulus of the Trier Social Stress Test in order to perform a primary assessment and consistency check of the proposed reference. The proposed scale clearly differentiates between the induced relax and stress states.

CONCLUSIONS: Accepting the subjectivity of the definition and the lack of a subsequent validation with new experimental data, the proposed standard differentiates between a relax state and an emotional stress state triggered by a moderate stress stimulus, as it is the Trier Social Stress Test. The scale is robust. Although the variations in the percentage composition slightly affect the score, but they do not affect the valid differentiation between states.