Cardiovascular, neurophysiological, and biochemical stress indicators: A short review for information systems researchers

Abstract

We conducted a systematic review of the scientific literature on indicators for stress measurement. The full texts of 128 articles (published in the period 1970–2017) were analyzed and we identified a total of 21 different stress indicators, including cardiovascular, neurophysiological, and biochemical measures. Moreover, we analyzed the frequency of use of the indicators. Glucocorticoids including the hormone cortisol (52 out of 128 articles), heart rate (HR) and heart rate variability (HRV) (50/128), as well as diastolic blood pressure (DBP) and systolic blood pressure (SBP) (40/128), are the dominant stress indicators. Also, we found that half of the articles (64/128) report about at least two different stress indicators, thus a combination of biological measurement approaches is relatively common in stress research. This review holds value for researchers in the Information Systems (IS) discipline and related interdisciplinary research fields such as technostress.