The Impact of Personality on Perceived Stress

Overview

The purpose of this project was to attempt to find a correlation between stress hormone levels and detected symptoms of stress in different personality types. We predicted that although people may believe they feel little to no feelings of anxiety in situations where they experience pressure, the cortisol levels in their saliva would reveal that the body did indeed react as if they were in distress. To complete this experiment, we gave ten high school age participants a summary of the exercise they would be completing and have their parents sign a form allowing their child to participate. While waiting to be tested, subjects completed a PRPSA (personality test), categorizing them as introverted or extroverted. Upon entering the lab, a preliminary saliva sample was taken. Next, they were given one minute to prepare notes for a speech on a simple topic and given one and a half minutes to speak about it. Another swab test followed. The same speech procedure was then repeated with a different topic. Finally, they were asked to complete a final swab test and take one last two question survey with similar topics as the first. Each participant's surveys and speech preparation papers were numbered and stored together for data analysis purposes. Their samples were also numbered and stored in a freezer. We found that those who were categorized as introverted perceived themselves as being more stressed, although their cortisol levels were only slightly different from other participants. However, there was no definite connection between cortisol levels and personal response.

Competition history

• AJAS 2019 Category not listed

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

• All Behavioural and Social Sciences projects
• AJAS Behavioural and Social Sciences projects
• Every AJAS 2019 project