Research Article Summary #2

EMOTION , HEALTH , STRESS : A Triangular Perspective

Mood Changes in Response to Psychosocial Stress in Healthy Young Women : Effects of Pretreatment with Cortisol (A Psychology Journal Article Review

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In an article entitled Mood Changes in Response to Psychosocial Stress in Healthy Young Women : Effects of Pretreatment with Cortisol written by Serkan Het and Oliver T . Wolf of the University of Bielefeld they shed light on testing the hypothesis cortisol has protective effects on mood during

a situation with strong emotional load (e .g psychosocial stress (Het and Wolf , 2007 . The authors further emphasized that they tested the hypothesis in a double-blind randomized , and placebo-controlled experiment (Het and Wolf , 2007

Their respondents consisted of forty four females who are medication-free , non-smoking , voluntary participants . Further , the group of female respondents has a mean age of 22 .7 years with a standard deviation of -2 .5 and a mean body mass index (BMI ) of 21 .1 with a standard deviation of -2 .2 . This group composed of students from the University of D 'sseldorf in D 'sseldorf , Germany . All of the respondents took hormonal oral contraceptives that led to a blunted-free cortisol response in the used stress diagram (Het and Wolf , 2007

The study was conducted during the 15th and 21st day of the intake of the oral contraceptives by the respondents . The respondents were further asked to take 30-mg , or 3 doses of 10-mg cortisol fifteen minutes after their first arrival in the laboratory . It consisted of pre-testing of saliva for cortisol levels which were subjected to biochemical analysis Also , the psychometric state of the respondents was measured using the German version of Costa and McCrae 's questionnaire on the Big Five personality factors , Stress Coping Inventory , and a German questionnaire The Trier Inventory for the Assessment of Chronic Stress (Het and Wolf , 2007

The forty-four female respondents were subjected to the Trier Social Stress Test , which has been proven to produce significant hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA ) responses (Het and Wolf , 2007 After the test , cortisol-treated subjects reached a significant level of cortisol in their saliva in all points after treatment in comparison with their initial level and with the placebo groups (Het and Wolf 2007 . For the salivary alpha-amylase (sAA , both the cortisol-treated group and the placebo-group were similar at the baseline and showed an increase after being subjected to TSST (Het and Wolf , 2007 . As with the subjective mood ratings , the cortisol-treated group showed more positive moods compared to the placebo group (Het and Wolf , 2007

The authors arrived at the conclusion that cortisol helped as a protection from psychosocial stress-induced mood changes in healthy young women (Het and Wolf , 2007 . The findings could be of great help in finding ways to reduce the impact of psychosocial stress that provides mood changes (Het and Wolf , 2007 . It does not exclude those with phobia and in fact , proves to be of great help (Het and...