Autonomic and Behavioral Reactivity to an Acute Laboratory Stressor

Stress has been widely shown to directly influence people's emotional and behavioral processing as well as their underlying biological systems. This project examined physiological and behavioral responses as indicators of stress and coping in the context of a psychosocial stressor in a controlled laboratory setting. We examined the association between indicators of behavioral coping and underlying physiological reactivity within participants while experiencing stress. Participants included 68 emerging adults. Physiological measures include autonomic biomarkers (e.g., heart-rate, skin conductance) at rest and during the stressor while behavioral indicators that were coded include acute verbal and non-verbal actions exhibited by participants during the stressor. Results supported the efficacy of a modified social stressor at eliciting stress responding in participants. In addition, behavioral coping was found to be associated with autonomic responding to the stressor. Exploring these associations has important implications for understanding the interaction between biological and behavioral responding to stress. The general intention of this thesis is to explore how stressor affects changes in an individual's explore a basic tenet of behavioral endocrinology: that hormone apparent and important. The introduction will review the literature exploring the history, constructs, and processes related to stress; the anatomical and physiological components involved in stress responsivity; how one elicits setting; and finally, the behavioral expression observation of stress-related behaviors or coping behaviors examined physiological and psychological effects of stress in a variety of settings attempted to uncover an association between autonomic functioning within the context of an setting. As such, this is the overarching goal of the present study how subtle changes to experimental protocol can affect the salience and responder laboratory stressor. The concepts outlined in the following sections may be considered in the context of the associations presented in Figure 1. Figure 1. A theoretical construct of 1 Introduction of this thesis is to explore how exposure to an acute laboratory an individual's physiology and behavior. Doing so will directly avioral endocrinology: that hormone-behavior associations are The introduction will review the literature exploring the history, constructs, and processes related to stress; the anatomical and physiological components ; how one elicits a physiological stress response in a laboratory finally, the behavioral expression that can occur in response to stress exposure related behaviors or coping behaviors. While many studies have physiological and psychological effects of stress in a variety of settings uncover an association between specific coping behaviors and immediate within the context of an acute …