The effect of an environmental stressor on gender differences on the awakening cortisol response

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2008.03.003Get rights and content

Summary

Objectives

The aim of the current study was to investigate the effect of an environmental stressor, examination stress, on waking cortisol levels.

Methods

Sixty-two subjects were tested upon awakening during periods of low and high examination stress. Samples were collected on 4 sampling days total, two of these days were during a low examination period and two of these days were during a high examination period. During each day, subjects collected salivary samples at waking, 30 min after waking, and 60 min after waking. Subjects also completed three questions asking about their present mood.

Results

As a group, subjects had higher negative mood on the mornings during the high examination stress period than on the mornings during the low examination stress period. Furthermore, when the sex of the subject was considered, cortisol levels were found to be significantly higher in females during the high examination period, but not in males. However, the changes in waking cortisol across the two stress periods were not correlated with the changes in psychological stress across the same sessions for either sex. In conclusion, the waking cortisol was found to be sensitive to the examination stressor protocol, but only in females.

Conclusions

These findings, in conjunction with others, may help to build more comprehensive models of how the two sexes differ in hormonal and psychological stress responses.

Section snippets

Subjects

Sixty-six college students aged 18–21 years (31 males and 35 females) served as participants. Exclusion criteria included: (i) smokers, (ii) left-handers, (iii) non-native English speakers, (iv) those with vision that was not corrected to normal, (v) antihistamine, glucocorticoid or asthma medication users, (vi) those with exposure to general anesthesia in the last year, (vii) those with a personal or first-degree family diagnosis of a DSM-IV, Axis I disorder, and (viii) those with endocrine

Inclusion of subjects

Sixty-two subjects were included in all cortisol-related analysis. Fifty-three of these subjects were included in analyses of mood and in analyses of the correlations between mood and morning cortisol because of missing mood data for nine subjects.

Log transformation of cortisol data

As is typical for cortisol data, the distribution was positively skewed. Therefore, we used a natural log transformation on cortisol (LNCORT), which reduced the skewness and kurtosis of the distribution.

Preliminary analyses: analysis for confounding group variable

A preliminary ANOVA was performed to exclude

Discussion

There is an abundance of evidence to suggest that waking cortisol serves as an important marker of HPA-axis activity. While there is evidence to suggest that this marker may represent a relatively stable, individual difference variable (e.g., Clow et al., 2004), there is also evidence to suggest that this cortisol response can be affected by proximate characteristics, such as transient stress levels. In the present study, we tested the effect of examination stress on morning cortisol levels and

Role of the funding sources

Funding for the study was provided by from the National Science Foundation (NSF–BCS–0224069) awarded to N. Weekes and R. Lewis: The NSF had no further role in study design; in the collection, analysis and interpretation of data; in the writing of the report; and in the decision to submit the paper for publication.

Conflict of interest

None of the authors have any conflicts of interest.

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge Salimetrics, LLC for performing the biological assays and thank Dennis Chang, Ambereen Kurwa, Erin Mohr, Rebecca Sheehan-Stross, Elizabeth Volkmann, and Tracy Wang for their assistance in conducting this study. We would also like to thank Daniel Hruschka for statistical advice.

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