A Review of Behavioral Observation Coding Approaches for the Trier Social Stress Test for Children.

Kristel Thomassin,Jacqueline Hersh,Jacquelyn Raftery-Helmer

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02610

Abstract

The Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) has become one of the most widely-used protocols for inducing moderate psychosocial stress in laboratory settings. Observational coding has been used to measure a range of behavioral responses to the TSST including performance, reactions to the task, and markers of stress induced by the task, with clear advantages given increased objectivity of observational measurement over self-report measures. The current review systematically examined all TSST and TSST-related studies with children and adolescents published since the original work of Kirschbaum et al. (1993) to identify behavioral observation coding approaches for the TSST. The search resulted in 29 published articles, dissertations, and master's theses with a wide range of coding approaches used. The take-home finding from the current review is that there is no standard way to code the Trier Social Stress Test for Children (TSST-C), which appears to stem from the uniqueness of investigators' research questions and sample demographics. This lack of standardization prohibits conclusive comparisons between studies and samples. We discuss relevant implications and offer suggestions for future research.

Highlights

The Trier Social Stress Test (TSST; Kirschbaum et al, 1993) has become one of the most widely-used protocols for inducing moderate psychosocial stress in laboratory settings
The TSST protocol contains all the elements of a stress-inducing task, including a threat to the social self, uncontrollability, and unpredictability (Dickerson and Kemeny, 2004). It was originally developed for use with adult samples, the TSST has since been modified for children (TSST-C) and has been used with children as young as 7 years old (e.g., BuskeKirschbaum et al, 1997, 2003)
The current review systematically examined all TSST and TSST-related studies with children and adolescents published since the original work of Kirschbaum et al (1993) with the goal of identifying the myriad of ways that performance on the TSST has been measured

Summary

Introduction

The Trier Social Stress Test (TSST; Kirschbaum et al, 1993) has become one of the most widely-used protocols for inducing moderate psychosocial stress in laboratory settings. The TSST consists of an anticipation period followed by a test period during which participants deliver a speech as if they are at a job interview and perform mental arithmetic in front of a panel of “experts” or “judges,” who are experiment confederates trained to appear stoic. Participants are informed their performance will be evaluated by the panel of experts, which is designed to induce stress as participants anticipate possible negative judgements regarding their performance. TSST-C Observational Coding studies diverge in the content or topic of the speech and common alterations have included asking participants to present on how a story would unfold (e.g., Panjwani et al, 2016; Wedl et al, 2016), the content of a text (e.g., Roth and Herzberg, 2017), one of multiple provided topics (Oppenheimer et al, 2016), running for class president (Geiss, 2016), and what makes a good friend (Benoit, 2013; Rith-Najarian et al, 2014)

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