People often experience acute psychological stress in daily life. The cognitive processing of our brain (attention, cognitive control, memory, and social cognition are all affected by acute psychological stress. Acute psychological stress induces a series of neuroendocrine reactions, which could affect cognitive processing through neurotransmitters, hormones and neuropeptides. The traditional way of stress induction requires a lot of manpower and material resources, and it is difficult to maintain consistency among different participants. The purpose of this study is to create a high-altitude VR scene that is repeatable and easy to operate in a laboratory environment, and to explore the stress response induced by this scene and verify its effectiveness.The study consists of two experiments to create a repeatable stress-inducing paradigm in the laboratory environment. A high-altitude scene was constructed through virtual reality (VR) technology and simulation props. At the same time, three high-altitude tasks were designed to induce the stress response of participants. In experiment 1, participants were 44 healthy male college students. Subjective stress report and PANAS scale were used as psychological indicators. Meanwhile, the effectiveness of this paradigm in the general population was verified by real-time heart rate, salivary cortisol level and performance of working memory tasks before and after stress. Considering the particularity of this high-altitude scene, experiment 2 selected 12 male flying cadets as participants, and also verified the effectiveness of this scene in special population by analyzing the above two major physiological and psychological indicators.Results showed that two groups of participants had higher level of subjective report stress, salivary cortisol and heart rate than the baseline state, which preliminarily verified the effectiveness of the paradigm on inducing stress response. Moreover, two groups of participants had different experience in high altitude, which further validate that the paradigm has potential replication in special groups.
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