Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities Journal

The purpose of this study is to gauge the effects of perceived general stress levels and acute stress on working-memory-basedcognitive performance. Cortisol is the long-term stress hormone of the body, and is vital to enacting a quick and efficient stress response. However, when chronically present at higher-than-normal levels as often can be the case with long-term perceived stress cortisol has been known to negatively affect many bodily systems, including reproductive, immune, and cognitive function. Our study seeks to explore the effect that higherthan-average perceived general stress levels have on female students’ performance on two cognitive tasks: a math exam with gradually increasing difficulty, and a complicated traceable maze that participants must solve after being shown the answer key for a few seconds beforehand. This study will utilize a basic health questionnaire, a general stressquestionnaire, a mental math exam that gradually increases in difficulty and has a time limit (thus creating increased stress with urgency to complete), and a traceable maze test that is intended to test working memory. This study has far-reaching implications in understanding the relationship between ambient stress, general stress and cognitive performance, and could pave the way for improvements in mental health resources, accessibility to these mental health resources in higher education, and women’s health in general.