Participants
DISORDER, ENDOCRINE DISORDERS
The study was preregistered on ClinicalTrials.gov (Identifier: NCT03505437). Female participants with a fear of spiders and cockroaches were recruited via various advertisements (e.g., social media groups and online bulletin boards). Participants with a history of a mental disorder, other than a specific fear for spiders and cockroaches, were not invited to the study. Other exclusion criteria involved the presence of neurological and/or endocrine disorders, pregnancy, current pharmacological treatment, and current smoking (> than five cigarettes per month). Finally, participants with a body mass index (BMI) greater than 27 or smaller than 19 kg/mA total of 104 individuals took part in a pre-experimental telephone screening to check for inclusion/exclusion criteria. Participants were not required to fulfill the diagnosis of a specific phobia although they had to present a substantial degree of fear towards spiders and/or cockroaches. The latter was ascertained on the basis of specific self-report measures, i.e. the Fear of spiders questionnaire (FSQ; Rinck et al. The final sample, therefore, included 48 women who were assigned to either the stress or the No-Stress group. In particular, 15 All experimental procedures were approved by the ethics committee of the Faculty of Psychology of the Ruhr University Bochum and carried out in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. All participants provided written informed consent and received a compensation of 60€ for the completion of the study.