Definition
Laboratory mental stress tasks are commonly used in behavioral medicine to assess the physiological responses to a standardized stressor in a controlled setting (Turner 1994).
Description
Even though originally it was thought that particularly exaggerated physiological responses to mental stress can be predictive of cardiovascular disease (Obrist 1981), there is now growing evidence that blunted physiological responses can also be associated with poor health (Carroll et al. 2009). Other evidence is available that not the responses to mental stress itself but the physiological recovery upon completion of the stress task can be related with the poor health outcomes (Larsen and Cristenfeld 2011). There is a large body of research that explores the associations between psychological traits (e.g., competitiveness and hostility) and mental disorders (e.g., depression and anxiety) with the individual...
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References and Further Reading
Carroll, D., Lovallo, W. R., & Phillips, A. C. (2009). Are large physiological reactions to acute psychological stress always bad for health? Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 3, 725–743.
Kirschbaum, C., & Hellhammer, D. H. (1993). The ‘Trier Social Stress Test’ – A tool for investigating psychobiological stress responses in a laboratory setting. Neuropsychobiology, 28, 76–81.
Larsen, B. A., & Cristenfeld, N. J. (2011). Cognitive distancing, cognitive restructuring, and cardiovascular recovery from stress. Biological Psychology, 86, 143–148.
Lovallo, W. R. (1997). Stress & health, biological and psychological interactions. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Obrist, P. A. (1981). Cardiovascular psychophysiology: A perspective. New York: Plenum Press.
Steptoe, A., Hamer, M., & Chida, Y. (2007). The effects of acute psychological stress on circulating inflammatory factors in humans: A review and meta-analysis. Brain, Behavior, and Immunity, 21, 901–912.
Strike, P. C., & Steptoe, A. (2003). Systematic review of mental stress-induced myocardial ischaemia. European Heart Journal, 24, 690–703.
Stroop, J. (1935). Studies of interference in serial verbal reactions. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 18, 643–662.
Turner, J. R. (1994). Cardiovascular reactivity and stress. New York: Plenum Press.
Van Eck, M. M., Nicolson, N. A., Berkhof, H., & Sulon, J. (1996). Individual differences in cortisol responses to a laboratory speech task and their relationship to responses to stressful daily events. Biological Psychology, 43, 69–84.
Veldhuijzen van Zanten, J. J. C. S., Ring, C., Burns, V. E., Edwards, K. M., Drayson, M., & Carroll, D. (2004). Mental stress-induced hemoconcentration: Sex differences and mechanisms. Psychophysiology, 41, 541–551.
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van Zanten, J.V. (2019). Stress Test. In: Gellman, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Behavioral Medicine. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6439-6_496-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6439-6_496-2
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