@article{ref1,
title="The effect of acute exercise and psychosocial stress on fine motor skills and testosterone concentration in the saliva of high school students",
journal="PLoS one",
year="2014",
author="Wegner, Mirko and Koedijker, Johan M. and Budde, Henning",
volume="9",
number="3",
pages="e92953-e92953",
abstract="Little is known about the influence of different stressors on fine motor skills, the concentration of testosterone (T), and their interaction in adolescents. Therefore, 62 high school students aged 14-15 years were randomly assigned to two experimental groups (exercise, psychosocial stress) and a control group. Exercise stress was induced at 65-75% of the maximum heart rate by running for 15 minutes (n = 24). Psychosocial stress was generated by an intelligence test (HAWIK-IV), which was uncontrollable and characterized by social-evaluative-threat to the students (n = 21). The control group followed was part of a regular school lesson with the same duration (n = 28). Saliva was collected after a normal school lesson (pre-test) as well as after the intervention/control period (post-test) and was analyzed for testosterone. Fine motor skills were assessed pre- and post-intervention using a manual dexterity test (Flower Trail) from the Movement Assessment Battery for Children-2. A repeated measure ANCOVA including gender as a covariate revealed a significant group by test interaction, indicating an increase in manual dexterity only for the psychosocial stress group. Correlation analysis of all students shows that the change of testosterone from pre- to post-test was directly linked (r = -.31, p = .01) to the changes in manual dexterity performance. Participants showing high increases in testosterone from pre- to post-test made fewer mistakes in the fine motor skills task. <br><br>FINDINGS suggest that manual dexterity increases when psychosocial stress is induced and that improvement of manual dexterity performance corresponds with the increase of testosterone.<p /> <p>Language: en</p>",
language="en",
issn="1932-6203",
doi="10.1371/journal.pone.0092953",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0092953"
}