Table 1.
Summary statistics (Mean and SD) by day for cortisol measures immediately after awakening (0 min), 30 and 45 min later, an aggregate measure of the cortisol awakening response, sleep quality, awakening time and momentary daily life stress and distress aggregated over the day.
Table 2.
Spearman correlations of main variables by study day (n = 20–23).
Table 3.
Results of models predicting momentary distress from the cortisol level at awakening (S1) and momentary daily life stress.
Figure 1.
Illustration of the attenuation of distress responses to daily life stress (within-person centered) by the cortisol awakening response (CAR) increase (as indicated by the area under the curve increase, AUCI, see text for details) on study days 1 and 2.
Solid lines show the association at 1 standard deviation (SD) below average CAR AUCI (i.e. relatively low CAR increase), dashed lines that at 1 SD above average CAR AUCI (i.e. relatively high CAR increase). On both days, distress was found to be lower at relatively high levels of daily life stress if the cortisol awakening response was high, whereas no differences in distress were seen at within-person average levels of daily life stress.
Table 4.
Results of models predicting momentary distress from the cortisol awakening response increase (AUCI) and momentary daily life stress.