The Effects of Chewing Gum on Physiological Stress Responses and Cognitive Recall

An article that appeared in JASS, issue 2018The objective of this study was to evaluate how chewing gum both affects physiological stress responses directly and short-term memory indirectly. It was hypothesized that chewing gum will directly attenuate the elicited physiological stress response and indirectly enhance cognitive performance. Stress response to verbal and audio stressors was measured through changes in blood pressure (BP), heart rate (HR) via electrocardiography (ECG), and brain wave activity via electroencephalography (EEG). Two subject groups, Group A and Group B, completed a word search task followed by a recall task. The groups differed in the time at which they received a piece of gum within the study. Group A received gum after the stress induced task and Group B received the gum before the stress induced task. Results concluded that, contrary to the hypothesis and the findings of prior studies, chewing gum neither significantly changed the three physiological measurements upon exposure to the stressor, nor did it indirectly enhance cognitive recall performance. Increased systolic BP during the recall task was the only significant result between groups (p=0.039; 95% CI). Chewing gum led to a 5 times greater increase in BP, though marginally statistically insignificant (p=0.053: 95% CI). No significant findings were identified for HR or brain wave activity, either between groups or while chewing gum (vs. baseline). Increasing the amount of participants and improving quality of equipment could improve future studie