Psychological Testing is one of eleven International Bedrest Standard Measures conducted on healthy subjects at the :envihab facility in Cologne, Germany. Psychological Testing will consist of Positive and Negative Affect Scale (PANAS) and the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ). The Positive and Negative Affect Scale (PANAS) Test Battery is a 20-item self-evaluation questionnaire that measures affects, or indicators of emotional stress. Emotional states are important to study during situations of isolation and confinement like bed rest experiments because they reflect the general state of the person at one step of the experiment. The PANAS separately assesses positive and negative effects. A positive affect reflects the extent to which a person feels enthusiastic, active, and alert. A person displaying high-positive affect has high energy, full concentration, and pleasurable engagement while a low-positive affect is characterized by sadness and lethargy. The separate measure of negative affect reflects the degree to which a person feels subjective distress and unpleasant engagement. A high-negative affect is described by anger, contempt, disgust, guilt, fear, and nervousness while a low-negative affect is described by a state of calmness and serenity.

GHQ is a self-evaluation questionnaire that measures the current mental health of the individual, utilizing the GHQ-12 and GHQ-28. For bed rest studies, GHQ is used to measure minor mental health problems and can be useful to prevent more important mental disorders during isolation and confinement situations. The GHQ-12 provides an overall total score for mental health, while the GHQ-28 provides an overall total score and scores on four subscales of somatic symptoms: anxiety, insomnia, social dysfunction and severe depression. The advantage of having four subscales makes the GHQ-28 a useful measure for bed rest studies. Each item on the GHQ is rated on a 4-point scale (0 to 3) indicating ‘less than usual’, ‘no more than usual’, rather more than usual’, ‘and much more than usual’.

The purpose of the standard measures project is to populate a repository with data that enables high-level monitoring of countermeasure effectiveness and meaningful interpretation of health and performance outcomes. These standard measures will support future, hypothesis-driven research that enables planetary missions by providing an optimized minimal set of measures captured from subjects. These measures will be available to other studies under data sharing agreements as well as undergo analysis to understand risk posture.

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