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\u2019s 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\u2019s the part that\u2019s 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\u2019s why we measure it in saliva and of course with kids it\u2019s great, it\u2019s 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\u2019t ask them to spit. Surprisingly little kids don\u2019t like to spit. They\u2019ll 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\u2019re collecting all the little grains and then we just take the cotton away. And as far as they\u2019re concerned they\u2019ve played what we call the tasting game. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
(Example of tasting game done with children) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s so simple parents can collect for us at home which allows us to look at home versus another setting. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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\u2019s very strange but the logic is simple. When we produce this hormone in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"template-text-only.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1583","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1583"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1583\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1584,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1583\/revisions\/1584"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}