An experience sampling study into stress and the presence of friends

Nowadays stress constitutes a social phenomenon, and a constituent feature of university student’s everyday life, which might potentially have serious consequences. Most research assessed stress as a trait-like construct, assuming that stress is relatively stable over time. But, stress can also be considered as a state fluctuating over time within individuals. Moreover, stress levels were found to be highly context dependent. Previous research found that people seem to be less stressed in the presence of their friends. However, there is a lack of research focusing on the role of context and considering the nonergodic nature of stress as a psychological phenomenon, which is inherently dynamic and fluctuates within individuals over the course of time. The aim of the current study was to investigate how the presence of friends correlates with momentary fluctuations of stress within individuals over time.