English language and linguistics research seminar: Sophia Juul (Lund University): From Lab to Language Classroom: Applications of Skin Conductance Response (GSR) in measuring arousal and stress in upper-secondary language teachers

Skin conductance response (SCR) measurements have been employed widely across disciplines, including psycholinguistics and clinical psychology, to detect different kinds of emotional arousal in response to stimuli as proxy measurement for variables such as pain, stress, or engagement. In laboratory settings, SCR has traditionally been employed to measure increases and decreases in emotional arousal in response to pre-determined stimuli in stationary tasks. Recently, the application of SCR measurements in ambulatory settings has been discussed in relation to current developments of wearable devices (Hu et al., 2024). This allows for the extrapolation of lab techniques to real-world contexts, increasing ecological validity (Raugh et al., 2019). To that end, the challenges involved in employing wearable devices aimed at measuring psychophysiological arousal as proxies for emotions in language classroom ecologies need to be explored in more transparent and comprehensive ways. 

In this presentation, I share experiences from a very recent data collection period in which SCR was employed to measure psychophysiological arousal as a proxy for language anxiety (LA) in one upper-secondary teacher of multiple languages (English and French). I present the various steps involved in building the data collection protocol and the challenges I faced in extrapolating a technique traditionally designed and confined to lab settings into the English language classroom.