Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. Corresponding author: Alaine E. School of Music main phone: , and fax: Acute psychological stress affects each of us in our daily lives and is increasingly a topic of discussion for its role in mental illness, aging, cognition, and overall health. Better understanding of how such stress affects the body and mind could contribute to the development of more effective clinical interventions and prevention practices.
Over the past three decades, the Trier Social Stress Test TSST has been widely used to induce acute stress in a laboratory setting based on the principles of social evaluative threat - namely, a judged speech-making task.
A comparable alternative task may expand options for examining acute stress in a controlled laboratory setting. Results indicate that men and women reported similarly high levels of subjective stress in response to both tasks.
However, men and women demonstrated different cortisol responses: men showed a robust response to both tasks, and women displayed a smaller response. These findings are consistent with previous literature, and further underscore the importance of examining possible sex differences throughout various phases of research, including design, analysis, and interpretation of results. Furthermore, this nascent examination of the I-SSST suggests a possible alternative for inducing stress in the laboratory.
Error bars indicate standard error of the mean. The figure presents untransformed change values, while the reported analysis in text used natural log transformed data. We found a robust sex difference in cortisol response yet no sex difference in subjective stress.
