Salivary Cortisol Levels and Depressive Symptomatology in Consumers and Nonconsumers of Self-Help Books: A Pilot Study

Table 1

Cohen’s effect sizes for the comparisons of basal/reactive cortisol and depressive symptoms between consumers and nonconsumers of self-help books and between consumers of problem-focused versus growth-oriented self-help books when compared to nonconsumers.

	AUC basal cortisol levels	AUC reactive cortisol levels	Depressive symptoms
Consumers versus nonconsumers	Cohen’s	Cohen’s	Cohen’s
Problem-focused versus growth-oriented versus nonconsumers	Cohen’s	Cohen’s	Cohen’s

Cohen’s represents one of several effect size measures that is generally used in the context of a -test for ANOVA. Cohen gives the following guidelines for the psychological and/or social sciences for Cohen’s values: small effect size = 0.10; medium effect size = 0.25; large effect size = 0.40.