Ethical non-confounding stress protocols for phonological WM and visuospatial WM

[GeorgeR]

I'm a graduate student in cognitive psychology, and I'm designing an experiment to test the effects of acute stress on different components of working memory, specifically the phonological loop versus visuospatial sketchpad. I'm struggling with the methodological details of creating a valid stress induction protocol that doesn't confound the working memory tasks themselves. For researchers who have conducted similar studies, what are the most reliable and ethical stress induction techniques for a lab setting, and how do you ensure the stressor doesn't directly interfere with task performance? What specific working memory paradigms have you found most sensitive to stress effects, and how do you control for individual differences in baseline stress reactivity or anxiety when analyzing the data?