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Using heart rate (HR) measurements to detect mental stress in naturalistic settings is hampered by the physiological impact of hemodynamic and metabolic demands. Correcting HR for these demands can help isolate fluctuations in HR associated with psychosocial stress responses, a concept termed additional heart rate (aHR). This study examined whether adding predictors for posture, activity type, and lagged movement intensity for the prolonged impact of physical activity (PA) improved aHR estimation across various manipulations of mental stress, posture, and PA in a controlled laboratory environment (n = 197). Accelerometer signals were used to obtain the movement intensity and to classify posture and activity type. Posture, activity type, and lagged movement intensity each led to a significant improvement in HR estimation, as measured by adjusted R 2 and root mean squared error. However, HR was overestimated during quiet sitting. The aHR, computed as the difference between observed and predicted HR, generally underestimated observed task-baseline reactivity but was sensitive to individual differences in reactivity to mental stressors. Between-subject correlations of aHR with task-baseline reactivity ranged from 0.62 to 0.93 across conditions. On a within-subject level, the ability of aHR to differentiate between exposure to physical stress and mental stress was limited (recall = 0.32, precision = 0.31), but better than that of observed HR (recall = 0.02, precision = 0.02). Future research should explore the potential of this novel aHR estimation method in differentiating physical and mental demands on HR in daily life, and its predictive value for health outcomes., (© 2024 The Author(s). Psychophysiology published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Society for Psychophysiological Research.)

Objectives: Listening effort is moderated by not only task difficulty, but also success importance. In real communication scenarios, success importance varies based upon the social context. However, in the laboratory, it can be challenging to manipulate social context without compromising experimental control. Outside of hearing sciences, studies have applied virtual reality (VR) to incorporate social context in a controlled and repeatable manner. Several of these studies have demonstrated that social manipulations in VR can reliably elicit changes in cardiovascular measures. Here, we investigated the effect of adding VR agents to a speech reception task, while measuring from the cardiovascular system., Design: Twenty-eight, normally hearing participants undertook a dichotic speech reception task. Sentences in stationary noise were presented dichotically, that is, different sentences presented simultaneously to each ear. Participants were tasked to either repeat one of the sentences (single-sentence condition) or both of the sentences (dual-sentence condition). The task was conducted under two VR conditions: (1) in the presence of agents, who provided sporadic performance feedback and (2) in the presence of nonagent controls, without any feedback given. Alongside task performance, we quantified changes in cardiovascular measures, relative to pretask baselines: heart rate variability, pre-ejection period, heart rate, and blood pressure. After each condition, participants rated their subjective effort, difficulty, performance, and engagement., Results: Performance and the subjective perception of performance were lower, while subjective effort and difficulty were higher, in the dual-sentence condition, compared with the single-sentence condition. Heart rate was the only cardiovascular measure that was sensitive to the experimental manipulations. Contrary to our expectations, heart rate increased in the nonagent control conditions, compared with the agent conditions. An exploratory analysis revealed heart rate fluctuations within a trial: heart rate was higher during the first 6 sec of the trial (reflecting the presentence masking noise and the sentence presentation) in the dual-sentence condition, compared with the single-sentence condition., Conclusions: This study was the first to incorporate VR agents who provided performance feedback during a dichotic speech reception task. Our results suggest that the VR agents did not increase success importance, which could be attributed to a lack of realism of the agents. We also demonstrated that the cardiovascular response to experimental manipulations may differ depending on the data window selected for analysis., Competing Interests: The authors have no conflicts of interest to disclose., (Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Ear & Hearing is published on behalf of the American Auditory Society, by Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc.)

In recent studies, psychophysiological measures have been used as markers of listening effort, but there is limited research on the effect of hearing loss on such measures. The aim of the current study was to investigate the effect of hearing acuity on physiological responses and subjective measures acquired during different levels of listening demand, and to investigate the relationship between these measures. A total of 125 participants (37 males and 88 females, age range 37-72 years, pure-tone average hearing thresholds at the best ear between -5.0 to 68.8 dB HL and asymmetry between ears between 0.0 and 87.5 dB) completed a listening task. A speech reception threshold (SRT) test was used with target sentences spoken by a female voice masked by male speech. Listening demand was manipulated using three levels of intelligibility: 20 % correct speech recognition, 50 %, and 80 % (IL20 %/IL50 %/IL80 %, respectively). During the task, peak pupil dilation (PPD), heart rate (HR), pre-ejection period (PEP), respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), and skin conductance level (SCL) were measured. For each condition, subjective ratings of effort, performance, difficulty, and tendency to give up were also collected. Linear mixed effects models tested the effect of intelligibility level, hearing acuity, hearing asymmetry, and tinnitus complaints on the physiological reactivity (compared to baseline) and subjective measures. PPD and PEP reactivity showed a non-monotonic relationship with intelligibility level, but no such effects were found for HR, RSA, or SCL reactivity. Participants with worse hearing acuity had lower PPD at all intelligibility levels and showed lower PEP baseline levels. Additionally, PPD and SCL reactivity were lower for participants who reported suffering from tinnitus complaints. For IL80 %, but not IL50 % or IL20 %, participants with worse hearing acuity rated their listening effort to be relatively high compared to participants with better hearing. The reactivity of the different physiological measures were not or only weakly correlated with each other. Together, the results suggest that hearing acuity may be associated with altered sympathetic nervous system (re)activity. Research using psychophysiological measures as markers of listening effort to study the effect of hearing acuity on such measures are best served by the use of the PPD and PEP., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest None., (Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)