Allyson Paton

1 Introduction Early childhood is a critical developmental period, with heightened sensitivity to adversity and programming of stress response systems (Loman and Gunnar 2010). The COVID-19 pandemic has presented challenges in acute stress research, while also offering a unique opportunity to develop remote assessment techniques. These techniques hold advantages by increasing research accessibility, user convenience, and removal of discomfort of novel lab environments (Archibald et al. 2019).