Visit order

The order of visits was counterbalanced randomly to manipulate experienced novelty of the testing environment (Sindi, Fiocco, Juster, Pruessner, & Lupien, 2013). In the first group (morning/afternoon; n = 49), participants received a blood draw (findings reported elsewhere; (Juster, Almeida et al., 2016; Juster, Ouelle, et al., 2016; Juster, Smith, Ouellet, Sindi, & Lupien, 2013)) in the morning during their first visit and were exposed to the TSST in the afternoon during their second visit about a week later; this was reversed for the second group (afternoon/morning; n = 37). Since the second group arrived for the first time to our laboratory when exposed to the TSST, we expected that they would be more distressed than the first group who had already familiarized themselves with the laboratory setting. Given that novelty to testing environments can be appraised as stressful (Sindi et al., 2013), preliminary analyses assessed whether visit order modulated cardiovascular functioning. This manipulation does not represent a circadian dissimilarity since participants were all exposed to the TSST in the afternoon (arrival time: M = 14.34, SE = 0.11; departure time: M = 16.17, SE = 0.11).