For more than three decades, the standard way to make a person measurably stressed in a laboratory has been to sit them in front of an unresponsive panel and ask them to sell themselves for a job. An article collecting accounts from 46 researchers who have run that experiment reports something the protocol never accounted for: the people playing the panel are carrying a burden of their own.
The article appears in Comprehensive Psychoneuroendocrinology and was written in honor of Clemens Kirschbaum, the German psychologist whose team introduced the Trier Social Stress Test in 1993. Rather than presenting new data, the authors compiled anecdotal reports from researchers about participant and panel member reactions, problems in running the protocol, and recommendations for designing future stress studies.
