Trier social stress test

They studied 100 people who had been raised in East Germany, dividing them into two groups, 49 who had experienced political repression and 51 match comparison participants who had not.

Everyone completed detailed questionnaires, and then those who were eligible and willing underwent the Trier Social Stress Test, a well-established laboratory procedure that reliably provokes a genuine stress response by having a person give an impromptu speech and perform mental arithmetic in front of an unresponsive panel of evaluators.

Throughout that challenge, the researchers measured subjective stress, how stressed people said they felt, along with cortisol, the primary stress hormone, heart rate, and heart rate variability.

The idea was to see whether the repression group, all these years later, would show a different biological stress signature And now the findings, which unfold in two acts.