Gunnar – measuring stress

It seems very odd to people when I say well, I study stress, I study the stress hormone and the first thing they ask is how do you get measures of this? And I say I just take spit and that’s very strange but the logic is simple. When we produce this hormone in the adrenal it goes into our bloodstream and goes around and does its work in the body but some of it seeps out into saliva through the pyrotic gland. The part that seeps out is the part that is actually not attached to proteins and that’s the part that’s biologically active in the body. So we can measure the concentration of this hormone in saliva and get a very accurate index of its concentration in blood. And that’s why we measure it in saliva and of course with kids it’s great, it’s an easy thing to do with many children. Nothing is easy with all children but most children are happy to play our games. We don’t ask them to spit. Surprisingly little kids don’t like to spit. They’ll spit if you tell them not to but not if you ask them to. So we use various techniques. One of them is a little bit like dip-stick candy. Maybe your students know what that is. We give them a roll of a long strand of cotton and a little cup with a few grains of sweetened crystals in it. They dip it into that, eat it, dip it again. The wetter your cotton is the more you’re collecting all the little grains and then we just take the cotton away. And as far as they’re concerned they’ve played what we call the tasting game. 

(Example of tasting game done with children) 

Non-invasive and it allows us, because the kids like it, to do it repeatedly so we can study them over the day. We can study them over a session in the lab taking as many as six samples in two hours. We can study them across days in child care and it’s so simple parents can collect for us at home which allows us to look at home versus another setting.