Psychologists standardized a 15-minute recipe for reliably making people stressed

In 1993, Clemens Kirschbaum and colleagues designed the Trier Social Stress Test: give someone a few minutes to prepare a speech, then have them deliver it to a stone-faced panel and solve arithmetic problems aloud, all on camera. It reliably spikes cortisol and heart rate, and became the standard lab tool for studying acute stress.

— Clemens Kirschbaum, Karl-Martin Pirke and Dirk H. Hellhammer, The 'Trier Social Stress Test' — A Tool for Investigating Psychobiological Stress Responses in a Laboratory Setting — Neuropsychobiology, 1993