Rott, Corinna
Thriving Under Pressure: From Operator Metrics to Insights on Negotiation Teams

How does a crisis team respond as pressure increases in real-world situations? For five years, the FieldLAB team has equipped police operators and frontline leaders with wearable sensors during actual operations, including tactical units, emergency personnel, and multi-day protocols that combine critical incidents with routine shifts and rest days. The resulting data has reshaped our understanding of stress. Stress is not constant; it occurs in recurring pressure points, intensifies in the latter part of a critical day as breaks diminish, and is most effectively mitigated by sleep, detachment, and physical activity. We are now expanding our focus from individuals to teams. Our research program, developed with the University of Houston and supported by the NTOA, examines how stress develops, spreads, and is managed within teams under pressure. We plan to study this during next year's National Negotiators' Challenge by collecting data from participating teams. This session will review key field data insights, outline upcoming research plans, and detail the benefits for participating negotiators.

Corinna Rott - Bio
Corinna Rott is a psychologist and affective-science researcher specializing in naturalistic, multimodal stress measurement in high-stakes teams. She integrates cardiac physiology, respiration, behavioral coding, and ecological momentary assessment into reproducible, FAIR datasets. As a state-certified nurse, she designs low-burden protocols for live operational and clinical settings. She serves as Co-Principal Investigator on TESTUDO and founded the FieldLAB program, leading multi-year physiological studies with police, military, and emergency teams in Switzerland and the Netherlands.

Naturalistic physiological measurement. Alongside the ACDC team under the supervision of Professor Pavlidis, she developed the open STREL benchmark (>20 million labeled HR/HRV data points; IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing) for TESTUDO-relevant naturalistic stress measurement. STREL uses activity-aware, baseline-corrected labeling to distinguish physical movement from the physiological signatures of cognitive and emotional stress. This addresses a core challenge in ambulatory mental stress monitoring and supports TESTUDO's methodology.

Team stress in high-stakes operations. She advanced the empirical understanding of team stress in high-stakes operations, as demonstrated by continuous multimodal monitoring during operational deployments lasting up to 50 hours and more than 170 physiology-informed debriefings (over 130 in law enforcement and over 40 in healthcare simulations and live emergency care), by integrating unobtrusive physiological monitoring with structured behavioral observation and data-driven recall methods. These studies characterize how stress is appraised, transmitted, and co-regulated within command and crisis teams and provide a direct empirical foundation for TESTUDO's team-level stress model.

Clinical and field integration. Her eight years as a state-certified nurse in chronic-disease, acute care and gerontopsychiatric care enable her to conduct independent medical onboarding, clinical assessment, and biological sampling (e.g., salivary cortisol) for field sites. This experience supports patient-centered, minimally disruptive data collection in TESTUDO's medical field settings.

Relevance to the ARI proposal (TESTUDO). As Co-Principal Investigator, Corinna Rott leads FieldLAB operations essential to TESTUDO. She established and maintains the Swiss field sites critical to the project: the Swiss Police Institute (Study 1, tactical leadership), Fedpol's Tactical Unit TIGRIS, and Inselspital Bern (Study 2, tactical and medical arms), which complement the US NTOA negotiation site. Her previous work demonstrates all capabilities required for TESTUDO, including continuous, unobtrusive cardiac monitoring in live high-stakes operations, activity-aware labeling to separate exertion from psychological stress (STREL), and physiologycued recall to assess arousal valence. Her studies of crisis-team leaders and stress in tactical and medical teams provide the empirical and methodological foundation for TESTUDO's team-level stress model.