A systematic scoping review identifying effective virtual reality stress tasks inducing physiological reactivity for future wearables validation

Efficient and ecologically sound validation of wearables remains a major challenge in stress research. Virtual reality (VR) could support this by providing standardized, immersive stress induction, but the field lacks a comprehensive and exhaustive overview of which VR tasks reliably evoke physiological stress responses. This review delivers a systematic comparison of VR stressors, mapping 11 tasks into three core stressor categories (social-evaluative, environmental, and cognitive) and offers a synthesis of their effectiveness, methodological characteristics, and suitability for VR-based wearables validation. We examined VR’s effectiveness for physiological stress elicitation, both qualitatively with the focus on task design and quantitatively through available effect sizes of responses. We observed high heterogeneity in stressor design and measurement methods, with the VR Trier Social Stress Test (VR-TSST) and the high-altitude task emerging as most promising VR stressors. Although several studies incorporated wearables, proving feasibility of such setups, none used VR explicitly for validating them. This review supports the use of VR for stress elicitation and for validation of wearable devices. It also enables informed stressor selection and VR study design while highlighting the existing gaps and future directions.