Ralph Kohnen, Hans-Peter Krüger

• Summary (Social Situations as Experimental Conditions in Psychopharmacology): To reduce a great variability of drug effects in healthy subjects, stress conditions are used often in pharmacopsychology. However, empirical results show that the desired stress effects are failing. This paper suggests to realize social stress Situations as interactions between subjects, expecting higher challenging effects than experimentator-subject-interactions, usually used in experimental designs. Two experimental studies are reported: the call-upsituation andSummary (Social Situations as Experimental Conditions in Psychopharmacology): To reduce a great variability of drug effects in healthy subjects, stress conditions are used often in pharmacopsychology. However, empirical results show that the desired stress effects are failing. This paper suggests to realize social stress Situations as interactions between subjects, expecting higher challenging effects than experimentator-subject-interactions, usually used in experimental designs. Two experimental studies are reported: the call-upsituation and the group-therapy situation. The experimental effects were measured by changes of pulse-frequencies. The results indicate that in the two situations high and low dosages of tranquilizing drugs lead to comparable (and so predictable) effects only, if a Situation is high challenging for the experimental subjects. The call-up situation, which proves performance, challenges male subjects highly. The emotional or social competence demanding group-therapy situation is a high challenging situation for warnen. It is concluded that no situation is stressing a person generally. Depending from personality characteristics, differential stressor effects appear. Consequences for experiments in pharmacopsychology are discussed.…