Salivary Cortisol Levels and Depressive Symptomatology in Consumers and Nonconsumers of Self Help Books: A Pilot Study
The self help industry generates billions of dollars yearly in North America. Despite the popularity of this movement, there has been surprisingly little research assessing the characteristics of self help books consumers, and whether this consumption is associated with physiological and/or psychological markers of stress. The goal of this pilot study was to perform the first psychoneuroendocrine analysis of consumers of self help books in comparison to nonconsumers. We tested diurnal and reactive salivary cortisol levels, personality, and depressive symptoms in 32 consumers and nonconsumers of self help books. In an explorative secondary analysis, we also split consumers of self help books as a function of their preference for problem focused versus growth oriented self help books. The results showed that while consumers of growth oriented self help books presented increased cortisol reactivity to a psychosocial stressor compared to other groups, consumers of problem focused self help books presented higher depressive symptomatology. The results of this pilot study show that consumers with preference for either problem focused or growth oriented self help books present different physiological and psychological markers of stress when compared to nonconsumers of self help books. This preliminary study underlines the need for additional research on this issue in order to determine the impact the self help book industry may have on consumers' stress.
Neural plasticity