Decision Under Stress Training (DUST)

It is widely recognised that police performance may be hindered by evolutionary-engrained psychophysiological state changes during acute stress. To address the need for awareness and control of these physiological changes, police academies in many countries have implemented Heart-Rate Variability (HRV) biofeedback training. Despite these training now being widely delivered in classroom setups, they typically lack the arousing action context needed for successful transfer to the operational field, where officers must apply learned skills, particularly when stress levels rise. In addition, current training strongly relies on internal motivation, as gaining biofeedback control can be a long and repetitive process. The DUST project addresses this by training physiological control skills in a gamified, arousing decision-making context. We developed a Virtual-Reality (VR) breathing-based biofeedback training where police officers receive closed-loop biofeedback on their HRV in an engaging game-like action context. This project is a collaboration between the EPAN lab (https://www.epanlab.nl/) and the Dutch Police and was set up together with the GemHlab . After initial promising results, the project is currently made ready for implementation in the Police academy curriculum. This involves simplifying the technical setup and improving the user-friendliness to allow for easy parallel training of multiple officers simultaneously. Subsequently, the new design will be tested across large groups of police officers to investigate the efficacy of the training further to reduce adverse effects of stress on both real-life performance and mental well-being.