The Social Psychophysiology & Health (SP&H) Lab studies how stress gets under the skin. We use social psychological methods to learn who is most affected by stress, which social and emotional factors make stress responses better or worse, and how those responses relate to health. Our measures include blood pressure, heart rate and heart rate variability, salivary cortisol, and self-reported emotion.
Current research
Virtual reality methods. We use immersive virtual reality to study how people respond to social situations under carefully controlled laboratory conditions, while measuring cardiovascular and hormonal responses. This approach lets us test how specific features of a social situation shape the body’s responses (Byron et al., 2023).
Social support. We study how support from others shapes emotional and physiological responses to challenging situations. Current projects ask why support helps some people more than others, including how prior experiences shape the way people respond to support.
Stress, identity, and health. We study how unique stress experiences relate to health in groups that often go understudied, including transgender and gender non-conforming people in rural areas and college students who hold multiple minority identities.
Coping and well-being. With colleagues across NDSU, we examine how coping strategies such as finding the silver lining protect well-being during prolonged stress (Pierce et al., 2026).
Biopsychosocial mechanisms of cardiovascular health
Much research on cardiovascular reactions to stress has been motivated by the reactivity hypothesis, which states that frequent, large increases in blood pressure and heart rate are associated with a person’s risk of cardiovascular disease (e.g., Krantz & Manuck, 1984). Whether reactivity contributes to disease or is a marker of disease is still unresolved, complicated by the fact that heart rate and blood pressure also rise when we are not stressed, presumably without increasing our risk of heart disease (Hilmert & Kvasnicka, 2010). Our lab examines how effort, emotion, and social support shape these responses, to better distinguish healthy from unhealthy patterns of physiological stress.
Interested in joining the lab? Contact us.
Selected publications
Pierce, M. J.,* Duggan, K. A., Hilmert, C. J., Fuller, H. R., & Hamm, J. M. (2026). Dynamic benefits of finding the silver lining: Secondary control as a buffer against declines in well-being during COVID-19. Motivation and Emotion, 50(4), 688-701. doi:10.1007/s11031-026-10195-9
Byron, G. S.,* Strahm, A. M., Bagne, A. G., & Hilmert, C. J. (2023). Using virtual reality to study the impact of audience size on cortisol responses to the Trier Social Stress Test. International Journal of Virtual Reality, 23(1), 1-16. doi:10.20870/ijvr.2023.23.1.7146
Reichenberger, D. A.,* Hilmert, C. J., Irish, L. A., Secor-Turner, M., & Randall, B. A. (2015). Associations between sleep and health-risk behaviors in a rural adolescent population. Journal of Pediatric Health Care, 30(4), 317-322.
Robinson, M. D., Ode, S.,* & Hilmert, C. J. (2014). Cortisol reactivity in the laboratory predicts ineffectual attentional control in daily life. Psychology & Health. doi:10.1080/08870446.2014.884224
Hilmert, C. J., Teoh, A. N.,* & Roy, M. M. (2013). Effort and negative affect interact to predict cardiovascular responses to stress. Psychology & Health, 29(1), 64-80. doi:10.1080/08870446.2013.825917
Bresin, K., Hilmert, C. J., Wilkowski, B. M., & Robinson, M. D. (2012). Response speed as a personality variable: Its role in moderating the agreeableness-anger relationship. Journal of Research in Personality, 46, 79-86.
Robinson, M. D., Ode, S., & Hilmert, C. J. (2011). Regulated and unregulated forms of cortisol reactivity: A dual vulnerability model. Psychosomatic Medicine, 73(3), 250-256.
Ode, S.,* Hilmert, C. J., Zielke, D. J.,* & Robinson, M. D. (2010). Neuroticism’s importance in understanding the correlates of heart rate variability: A daily life outcome study of stress, distress, and dysfunction. Emotion, 10(4), 536-543.
Hilmert, C. J., & Kvasnicka, L. R.* (2010). Blood pressure reactivity and emotional responses to stress: Perspectives on cardiovascular reactivity. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 4, 470-483.
* Graduate student author
