A meta-analysis of salivary cortisol responses in the Trier Social Stress Test to evaluate the effects of speech topics, sex, and sample size

作者：Haixia Gu, Xue’er Ma, Jingjing Zhao, Chunyu Liu · 发表于：Comprehensive Psychoneuroendocrinology · 年份：2022 · DOI：10.1016/j.cpnec.2022.100125 · 被引用次数：20 · 研究领域：Stress Responses and Cortisol、Mental Health Research Topics、Neuroendocrine regulation and behavior

The Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) is one of the most widely used laboratory-based psychological stress paradigms. Previous studies have shown that males have a more robust cortisol response than females in the TSST. However, the effects of sample size, speech topic, and interaction between sex and speech topic on cortisol responses in TSST remain elusive. Our goal was to evaluate these influencing factors in the TSST using salivary cortisol reactivity as an objective measure. We collected TSST research articles in Web of Science, PubMed, PsycNet, and CNKI. We only included TSST studies that had measures of salivary cortisol both before and after task completion. A total of 65 articles involving 76 sub-studies met our inclusion criteria, with a total of 5171 participants (2040 females and 3131 males). The effects of sample sizes were assessed to determine if results of studies with various sample sizes were stable. We performed multivariate meta-regression to determine the effects of speech topic, sex, and the interaction between sex and speech topic after controlling their confounding effects. Subgroup analysis of sex was conducted to detect inter-group differences. We further evaluated the baseline and peak salivary cortisol concentrations for males and females independently to detect the sources of sex differences. The average effect size (i.e., Cohen's d) of salivary cortisol reactivity was 0.93, 95% CI = 0.82 to 1.04, p < .001. The small studies produced larger variatio...