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Abstract Clarifying the nature of endocrine responses to chronic or intermittent stress in daily life requires repeated measurements of stress, hormone levels, and emotional states. In this study, 42 High Stress (HS) and 46 Low Stress (LS) subjects were selected on the basis of Perceived Stress Scale scores from a larger sample of male white-collar workers. Subjects completed self-reports Experience Sampling Method (ESM) and collected saliva samples for Cortisol determination ten times a day over five consecutive days, including three work and two non-work days. We test the hypothesis that high perceived stress is associated with elevated Cortisol. The HS group scored higher than the LS group on measures of trait anxiety, depression, anger, and psychosomatic complaints, as well as on ESM measures of positive and negative affect and stressful daily events. Although negative affect was higher and stressful events more frequent on workdays than weekends (especially for HS subjects), no difference in workday vs. weekend Cortisol levels was found in the subsample of subjects with sufficient data. On workdays, HS subjects had higher mean Cortisol levels than LS subjects at each of the ten sampling times between 8 a.m. and 10 p.m. (repeated measures ANOVA, p .02). Mean workday Cortisol was correlated with higher trait anxiety, depression, and the low arousal dimension of ESM negative affect.
Eck et al. (Sat,) studied this question.