Citation

Thomas L, Schwaninger A, Heimgartner N, Hedinger P, Hofer F, Ehlert U, Wirtz PH. Psychophysiology 2014; 51(9): 912-920.

Affiliation

Biological and Health Psychology, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2014, Society for Psychophysiological Research, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/psyp.12229

PMID

24785002

Abstract

Aviation security strongly depends on screeners' performance in the detection of threat objects in x-ray images of passenger bags. We examined for the first time the effects of stress and stress-induced cortisol increases on detection performance of hidden weapons in an x-ray baggage screening task. We randomly assigned 48 participants either to a stress or a nonstress group. The stress group was exposed to a standardized psychosocial stress test (TSST). Before and after stress/nonstress, participants had to detect threat objects in a computer-based object recognition test (X-ray ORT). We repeatedly measured salivary cortisol and X-ray ORT performance before and after stress/nonstress. Cortisol increases in reaction to psychosocial stress induction but not to nonstress independently impaired x-ray detection performance. Our results suggest that stress-induced cortisol increases at peak reactivity impair x-ray screening performance.

Language: en