Health Psychology and Behavioral Medicine

Innovative Approaches to Measuring Occupational Stress and Health Outcomes

Occupational stress remains a pervasive and escalating challenge across global workforces, cutting across industries, professional roles, and geographic boundaries. As workers navigate increasingly complex job demands, technological acceleration, staffing shortages, and rapid organizational change, the cumulative strain on employee well-being has intensified. Traditional understandings of workplace stress—once focused primarily on psychological strain or burnout—now fail to fully encompass the breadth of pressures modern workers encounter. Stress manifests not only through emotional exhaustion but also through measurable physiologic dysregulation, interpersonal conflict, role ambiguity, and chronic exposure to unsafe or inequitable work environments. Despite decades of research, many existing models capture only narrow dimensions of these realities, leaving critical gaps in understanding how diverse stressors interact and evolve over time. As work environments continue to shift, especially in high-risk sectors such as healthcare, education, and public safety, there is an urgent need to revisit how occupational stress is defined, conceptualized, and measured.

Addressing occupational stress with greater precision is essential because its impact extends far beyond individual discomfort, carrying measurable consequences for organizations and society at large. Chronic work-related stress contributes to increased absenteeism, turnover, reduced productivity, diminished job satisfaction, and elevated healthcare costs, ultimately undermining organizational stability and national economic performance. At the population level, prolonged exposure to workplace stress is linked to worsened mental health, cardiovascular disease, sleep disruption, and impaired immune functioning—conditions that collectively strain public health systems. Emerging science also demonstrates that stress may induce biologic and epigenetic changes with long-term implications for resilience, cognitive functioning, and overall mortality. Developing novel frameworks and multidimensional tools to capture these patterns is therefore critical for designing effective interventions, informing policy, and cultivating healthier, more sustainable work environments. Without modern measurement approaches that reflect the complexity of today’s workplace, efforts to reduce stress will remain fragmented and insufficient.

This Article Collection invites submissions that advance the science of occupational stress measurement and its impact on health behavior and psychological outcomes. We encourage interdisciplinary contributions from psychology, public health, organizational science, and behavioral medicine. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

• Development and validation of innovative stress measurement tools (e.g., ecological momentary assessment, wearable sensors, digital biomarkers).
• Conceptual or theoretical models linking occupational stress with health behaviors (e.g., sleep, physical activity, substance use) and mental health outcomes (e.g., burnout, resilience, posttraumatic growth).
• Longitudinal and intervention studies assessing causal pathways between stress exposure and physiological or psychological health outcomes.
• Novel analytic methods to examine multilevel or dynamic stress processes in the workplace.
• Qualitative studies that illuminate key variables of interest related to predictors or outcomes surrounding occupational stress
• Implementation of organizational or policy-level strategies aimed at mitigating occupational stress and improving workforce well-being.

Through this Collection, Health Psychology and Behavioral Medicine aims to showcase cutting-edge evidence and translational insights that expand how occupational stress is defined, measured, and addressed within contemporary work environments.

Please contact Dr. MK Huffman at [email protected] with any queries about discount codes regarding this Article Collection. Please be sure to select the appropriate Article Collection from the drop-down menu in the submission system.

Allison Andreno Norful, PhD, MPhil, MSN, BSN, ANP-BC, FAAN, is a board-certified adult nurse practitioner and health services researcher whose program of research examines physiological and epigenetic stress pathways that contribute to adverse psychological outcomes, including depression, anxiety, and suicide risk. She is jointly appointed as an Assistant Professor at Columbia University School of Nursing and as a nurse scientist across the NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital enterprise. Dr. Norful is internationally recognized for her expertise in latent construct measurement, psychometric testing, and care model analysis, and she is the developer of the Provider Co-Management Index, now used in multiple countries. Her research has been supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute of Nursing Research, the National Center for Advancing Translational Science, and several foundation and institutional grants.

Jonathan DePierro, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the Associate Director of Mount Sinai’s Center for Stress, Resilience and Personal Growth. His extensive body of peer-reviewed work focuses on healthcare worker mental health, the measurement of resilience, and resilience-building interventions with healthcare workers and special populations. His research is currently funded by US federal grants.

Dr. Norful and Dr. DePierro declare no conflicts of interest regarding this work.