Psychology students conduct research on stress

Posted: 03/15/2012

Although stress is a familiar and frequent occurrence in everyone’s life, why is that some people seem to deal with high levels of stress with composure, while others struggle with daily hassles that most take for granted?

That question is being investigated at Roosevelt University by students studying with Kimberly Dienes, an assistant professor of psychology and a licensed clinical psychologist.

“Twelve students in my lab are using data from my dissertation from UCLA to pilot their ideas about what ‘stress sensitive’ individuals look like,” she said. “The students’ ideas and findings will be written up in abstracts submitted to national conferences.”

It’s known that people react to stress with mental and physical changes in their bodies, preparing them to deal with a stressful situation. Biological reactions to stress include the secretion of cortisol, a “stress hormone” that occurs in regular daily cycles in all people and peaks in response to stress.

“We hypothesize there is a ‘stress sensitive’ phenotype that would include high chronic stress, the presence of severe stressful life events, and the presence of early adversity and personality variables that have been related to negative reactions to stress in past research,” Dienes explained.

She said that biological measures of stress allow her to determine whether people are responding to stressful situations even if they are not reporting a response, and to make comparisons of objective and subjective measures.

Under her direction, the students began conducting a study in May 2011 to test their hypotheses about the stress sensitive phenotype. They have been trained on the Life Stress Interview which assesses chronic and episodic stress, the Trier Social Stress Test which is a well-validated social stressor that reliably elicits a cortisol response and the Early Adversity Interview.

The students are sampling cortisol daily at four time points for two days to assess daily cortisol patterns and at several time points across the Trier Social Stress Test to determine acute stress reactivity.

“We also are attempting to examine interventions for stress sensitivity,” she said. “We are assessing the cortisol awakening response before and after a stress reduction intervention administered by Roosevelt’s Counseling Center. Sam Macy, a third year doctoral student working on his dissertation project, is predicting that the stress reduction intervention will result in a lower cortisol awakening response.”

In May 2012, three other doctoral students in clinical psychology, Allison Asarch, Nick Calingaert and Justin Garber will be presenting posters on their topics at the Association for Psychological Science.

A Roosevelt professor since 2009, Dienes believes the best way to learn is by doing. “I teach by using a great deal of active participation,” she said. “My Basic Clinical Skills course involves a lab component where students are recorded as they practice clinical skills with a partner; in Childhood and Adolescence, we include a community service component with children to see child development in action and my two doctoral classes include case examples, presentations and formulations to not only learn material, but apply it.”

For information about Roosevelt University’s undergraduate, graduate or doctoral programs in psychology, contact the department office at 312-341-3760 or see http://www.roosevelt.edu/psychology .

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