Date of Graduation
5-2023
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts in Psychology
Degree Level
Undergraduate
Department
Psychological Science
Advisor/Mentor
Shields, Grant
Committee Member
Stenken, Julie
Second Committee Member
Coridan, Robert
Third Committee Member
Thomas, Johanna
Abstract
The stress response is an essential physiological process that facilitates survival in threatening conditions. Stress impacts numerous bodily systems, and prior work has focused on cortisol, a steroid derived from cholesterol, as a key biomarker for assessing biological stress reactivity in humans. Social stressors are known to contribute to marked increased in cortisol levels, but to date little work has examined whether social situations known to be stressful in person can influence cortisol when those situations occur remotely. In this study, I investigated the effects of a Zoom-based social stressor on salivary cortisol. Participants were randomly assigned to the Zoom-stress or Zoom-control conditions, and saliva samples were collected before and after the manipulation to assess cortisol levels. I hypothesized that the Zoom based stressor would produce a cortisol response like in-person stressors do. Consistent with my hypothesis, I found that the Zoom-based stressor significantly increased cortisol levels and subjective stress relative to the control condition task, indicating that stressful social situations can elicit a stress response even when they are virtual. This work has implications for our understandings of stress and our increasingly virtual world.
Keywords
Stress; Cortisol; ELISA; assay; TSST; virtual; VTSST; saliva; virtual stress; stress response; cortisol response; cortisol assays; cortisol assay
Citation
Perkins, B. (2023). Examining the Effects of a Zoom Interview on Cortisol. Psychological Science Undergraduate Honors Theses Retrieved from https://scholarworks.uark.edu/psycuht/51
Included in
Behavioral Disciplines and Activities Commons, Behavior and Behavior Mechanisms Commons, Psychological Phenomena and Processes Commons