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