Investigating associations between momentary stress and cortisol in daily life: What have we learned so far?

Psychosocial stress reliably activates the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) axis, resulting in elevations of circulating cortisol. Kirschbaum et al. (1993) demonstrated this psychoneuroendocrinological association using a specific laboratory-based motivated performance-related stressor in a social-evaluative setting including uncontrollability, the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST). A meta-analysis later demonstrated that TSST-like stressors were indeed the most potent activators of cortisol responses to stress when compared to other stressors such as cognitive tasks, noise exposure or emotion induction without uncontrollable and social-evaluative elements (Dickerson and Kemeny, 2004).
Source: Psychoneuroendocrinology - Category: Psychiatry Authors: Source Type: research