Two new, brief, practical stressor tasks for research purposes

Four studies with college students assessed and refined two new, brief, personally-meaningfulbut apparatus-free research stressors. The first study had judges rank order 20 of the 40 Holmes-Rahe life event items, and then visualize in sequence the items ranked #3, #2, and #1. This (H-RV) task proved much more stressful than students' own worst recent event or a comparison videotape of a major chemical fire plus the near-fatal drownings of a father and child. The next study replicated the stressfulness of the H-RV task with only 10 items given to rank, and also introduced the “YELP” scale, an 8-item situational task which was nearly as stressful. Both the H-RV and YELP tasks far surpassed the prior videotape and usually surpassed ratings of own worst recent event. Women typically gave more stressful ratings than men, but the sexes were similar on the YELP scale. The last two studies compared the H-RV, and three stable YELP items, with cold pressor and mental arithmetic tasks. The H-RV, YELP, and mental arithmetic trials proved comparably stressful on heart rate and EMG measures, but all were somewhat weaker than the cold pressor.