Measuring the Effectiveness of Stress Prevention Programs in Military Personnel

摘要

The effects of stress on military personnel are a pervasive concern. To mitigate stress's negative impacts, Defense agencies employ stress inoculation training and, more recently, have begun to provide stress resilience instruction. However, such pre-deployment programs suffer from measurement limitations, rendering their assessment difficult. Novel application of objective, individual, repeated measures, conducted under realistically stressful settings, may help address this gap. Towards that end, we reviewed common neurophysiological techniques and examined their usefulness for measuring stress reactions. These techniques include: 1) cortisol in the blood or saliva, 2) adrenaline in the blood or urine, 3) skin conductivity, 4) EEG, 5) Skin conductance, and 6) Heart rate.