For more than three decades, psychology labs have had a dependable recipe for making a healthy adult miserable on command. Someone finally asked the people who cook it.
Forty six researchers who administer the Trier Social Stress Test responded to a call for their experiences with the paradigm, and their accounts appear in a new paper in the open access journal Comprehensive Psychoneuroendocrinology. The collection covers participant reactions, panel member reactions, and the practical headaches of running the protocol. The conclusion is not the one most readers would expect. The test appears to place a substantial burden not only on the volunteers being stressed but, in a different way, on the researchers sitting across the table.
