| خلاصه مقاله | Introduction: Academic tests and public speaking are among the main factors that causes stress in many people are. Thesis defense session covers both of these stresses. In this study, the amount of stress, cognitive function and salivary cortisol concentration of medical students in the night before the defense and a normal day without stress were compared. The overall purpose of this study was to determine the effects of (real) dissertation defense stress on cognitive function and the rate of salivary cortisol changes in students. In this study, for the first time, stress conditions were not simulated and subjects were sampled under real stress conditions.
Method and material: 18 male and female medical students were selected as subjects at different stages of this project, and after obtaining informed written consent, one night before the dissertation defense session, saliva samples and cognitive tests were taken by the software. Wisconsin card cognitive tests, simple stroop, reaction time, Wechsler numerical memory, Beck anxiety questionnaire and ELISA were used to measure salivary cortisol. All of these tests were performed again on a typical stress-free day after the dissertation defense session.
Results: The results of tests performed on students on the day before the defense showed that the stress of the defense session greatly increased salivary cortisol, anxiety symptoms in the Beck test and decreased cognitive abilities such as memory. This severe stress, in some people can cause mental, physical stress and various individual and social complications.
Conclusion: Anxiety, increased cortisol and decreased cognitive function in situations such as exams and defense sessions can cause a decrease in overall and executive function and reduce the individual's efficiency in such cases. Ways to reduce stress by the student and the university should be considered. |