title: Subjective Stress, Salivary Cortisol, and Electrophysiological Responses to Psychological Stress.
abstract: The present study aimed to investigate the subjective stress, salivary cortisol, and electrophysiological responses to psychological stress induced by a modified version of a mental arithmetic task. Fifteen participants were asked to estimate whether the multiplication product of two-decimal numbers was above 10 or not either with a time limit (the stress condition) or without a time limit (the control condition). The results showed that participants reported higher levels of stress, anxiety, and negative affect in the stress condition than they did in the control condition. Moreover, the salivary cortisol level continued to increase after the stress condition but exhibited a sharp decrease after the control condition. In addition, the electrophysiological data showed that the amplitude of the frontal-central N1 component was larger for the stress condition than it was for the control condition, while the amplitude of the frontal-central P2 component was larger for the control condition than it was for the stress condition. Our study suggests that the psychological stress characteristics of time pressure and social-evaluative threat caused dissociable effects on perception and on the subsequent attentional resource allocation of visual information.
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Psychology, Southwest University Chongqing, China.
authors.forename: Mingming
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Qi
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, Liaoning Normal University Dalian, China.
authors.forename: Heming
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Gao
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Psychology, Southwest University Chongqing, China.
authors.forename: Lili
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Guan
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Psychology, Southwest UniversityChongqing, China; College of Electronic and Information Engineering, Southwest UniversityChongqing, China.
authors.forename: Guangyuan
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Psychology, Southwest University Chongqing, China.
authors.forename: Juan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Yang
keywords: N1; P2; dissociable effect; mental arithmetic task; psychological stress