Using Multimodal Physiological Methods to Assess Urban Stress Experience - from the Lab to the Real World

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Klaus Gramann
• Subject Area: Biological Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 563691842

Urbanization has led to over half of the world’s population moving into cities and urban areas offering access to education, medical care, and cultural opportunities. However, urbanization also adversely impacts residents’ mental and physical well-being. Neurourbanism, a young and rapidly growing research field addresses issues of well-being and public health related to city living to identify urban factors that might mitigate or, conversely, lead to ill health with an emphasis on the application of neuroscientific methods. This proposal describes a new research program to investigate how built, green, and traffic density in an urban environment impact human stress experiences in the real world and how this compares to stress experiences in highly realistic 360° video and audio representation of the same environments. Overcoming existing methodological issues in Neurourbanism research, we suggest to 1) systematically quantify urban density using machine learning and digital twins of urban environments, 2) record multimodal physiological, behavioral, and subjective measures while participants walk through real-world urban environment, and to 3) directly compare multimodal human responses to density factors in the real world with responses to digital representations of the real world. We will use Mobile Brain/Body Imaging approaches to record multimodal human responses, including subjective data, behavioral data through eye tracking, brain activity, and additional peripheral physiological measures, during real-world urban promenades in systematically quantified built environments. The participants’ multimodal responses from select urban locations along promenades in the real-world will be compared with multimodal responses in high-resolution 360° videos from the very same locations including soundscapes recorded in the real world. This approach allows for comparing multimodal responses in environments with the highest possible ecological validity, i.e. the real world, with those to standardized and controllable 360°-videos to investigate whether these provoke comparable stress responses while offering additional experimental manipulation (e.g. of the associated soundscapes). Data-driven analysis approaches will be used in combination with events from multimodal physiological responses to derive blink-, fixation-, and heart-beat-evoked potentials to investigate the human brain dynamics in urban contexts. This allows for a systematic comparison of the EEG and other physiological parameters on multiple levels in the time and frequency domain in the real world as well as in the laboratory. The planned research program aims at gaining multi-modal insights into how density aspects of the urban environment influence people’s stress experience, which can eventually be used to inform guidelines for urban development and policy making to promote the mental and physical well-being of city dwellers.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants