Acute stress influences the emotional foundations of executive control: Distinct effects on control-related affective and cognitive processes

Effects of stress on cognitive performance

Stress remains a pervasive challenge in modern life, exerting significant impacts on cognitive performance and overall well-being by triggering release of stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. It has profound implications for education, work performance, and everyday life, impacting cognitive performance, health outcomes, and social relationships. It does this by impacting memory, attention and focus, informed decision-making, developmental and cognitive performance, work and educational performance, genetic and epigenetic influence, and public health. When a stressor is perceived, the hypothalamus in the brain signals the pituitary gland to release adrenocorticotropic hormone, hence adrenaline is quickly released into the bloodstream, causing immediate physiological changes and thus releasing cortisol gradually to help maintain the body's response to stress over a longer period through the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal and sympathetic-adrenomedullar axis. The impacts can be short-term or long-term focusing on the working memory, pre-frontal cortex, amygdala, and hippocampus. By recognizing these implications and implementing targeted interventions, we can foster environments that support resilience, optimize performance, and enhance overall well-being across diverse contexts. This chapter also highlighted some mitigation strategies to reduce stress-related activities and improve cognitive performance, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy, mindfulness-based stress reduction, healthy lifestyle adoption, pet therapy, time management and prioritization, and workplace interventions.

Acute stress differentially influences risky decision-making processes by sex: A hierarchical bayesian analysis

How does stress influence our decision-making? Although numerous studies have attempted to answer this question, their results have been inconsistent-presumably due to methodological heterogeneity. Drawing on cumulative prospect theory, we examined how acute stress influenced risky decision-making. To this end, we randomly assigned 147 participants to an acute stress induction or control condition and subsequently assessed participants' risky decision-making. We found that stress increased risky decision-making overall, but more importantly, that stress exerted multiple effects on risky decision-making processes that differed between male and female participants. For female participants, relative to the control condition, stress produced a pattern of decision-making characterized by risk seeking with respect to gains, slightly reduced loss aversion, accurate outcome probability assessment, and greater choice stochasticity. For male participants, stress, relative to the control condition, produced to a pattern of decision-making characterized by very low loss aversion and poorer outcome probability assessment. These results suggest that some of the heterogeneity in existing literature may be explainable by task differences in risk type, risk amount, and outcome certainties, and further that these effects will differ by sex. In short, stress changes how we make decisions, and it does so differently by sex.

Acute immune system activation exerts time-dependent effects on inhibitory control: Results of both a randomized controlled experiment of influenza vaccination and a systematic review and meta-analysis - ISPNE 2024 Dirk Hellhammer Award

Although coming down with an illness or receiving a vaccine are both common experiences, the influence of such acute immune system activations on cognitive processes, such as inhibitory control, has received relatively little attention. We addressed that issue by assessing the effects of acute immune system activation on inhibitory control in a randomized controlled experiment, and by conducting a meta-analysis of similar studies in humans. In our experiment, we found-somewhat surprisingly-that influenza vaccination improved performance on both of our inhibitory control outcomes (i.e., stop-signal reaction times and flanker interference effects). At the meta-analytic level, we found that at a short delay (1.5-4 hours post-injection) between immune activation and inhibitory control assessment, such activation impaired multiple forms of inhibitory control, whereas after a longer delay (e.g., > 18 hours post-injection), such activation improved inhibitory control-consistent with our experiment. Moreover, proinflammatory cytokine activity predicted poorer interference control but better response inhibition, even with a long delay between injection and testing. Together, these results highlight nuanced, time-dependent, and-perhaps-multiple-mechanism-driven effects of acute immune system activity on inhibitory control.

TSST-OL: Comparison between online and laboratory application and effects on empathy

Online test protocols are increasingly popular in psychological and neuroscientific research. Despite its relevance to the social functioning, the influence of acute stress on cognitive and affective state empathy is not clearly understood. Recently, a remote online version (TSST-OL) of the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) was established for use in research with both children and adults. In general, the TSST-OL offers the opportunity for context-independent application (e.g., at the participants' home or in field contexts). However, in order to exploit this opportunity, it seems crucial to validate the TSST-OL across different settings and contextual variables. We compared stress reactivity in response to the TSST-OL at home and in the laboratory. In a 2 ×2 factorial design, N=120 participants (n=60 women) underwent the TSST-OL and an online adaption of the friendly TSST (fTSST-OL) either at home (n=60) or at the laboratory (n=60). Stress induction was evaluated in terms of physiological (cortisol and salivary alpha-amylase, sAA) and subjective stress and affect measures. Participants also completed an empathy performance task after stress and control exposure. Results confirmed that the TSST-OL successfully induced stress both when conducted at participants' homes and in the laboratory. Still, cortisol levels were higher during laboratory participation compared to application at home, likely due to anticipatory stress. Consequently, the TSST-OL in a home-based application seems to buffer anticipatory stress thus making it an attractive tool to study experimentally induced stress reactivity. Concerning empathy, positive emotions were generally better identified (cognitive empathy) and empathized (affective empathy) than negative emotions. For the latter, this difference was absent after stress, indicated by decreased affective empathy for positive emotions. Overall, this study indicates that the TSST-OL induces stress and validates the tool using a rigorous study design with sufficient participants and relevant stress parameters. Thus, future studies may apply the TSST-OL in different contexts and diverse samples. The findings on empathy under stress align with mixed results in existing research, highlighting the necessity for further investigations into empathy, considering various measurements, stimulus valence, and sex of the participant.

A mismatch between early and recent life stress predicts better response inhibition, but not cognitive inhibition

A growing body of work has found that a mismatch between early and recent life stress, more than a cumulative influence of stress, contributes to detrimental stress-related health outcomes. To date, however, no work has examined how such a mismatch might relate to stress-related cognitive outcomes. We addressed this gap in the current study by assessing participants' (N = 154, Mage = 18.7, 104 female) early and recent life stress using the same inventory, and subsequently assessing their inhibitory control in a hybrid stop-signal/flanker task. Surprisingly, we found that a greater degree of stressor mismatch was associated with better response inhibition (i.e. smaller stop-signal reaction time) across a number of analytic approaches. Cognitive inhibition (i.e. the flanker interference effect) was not associated with stressor mismatch. These results thus show that a greater degree of mismatch between early and recent life stress is related to response inhibition in the same way as acute stress affects response inhibition, suggesting that response inhibition may be an important cognitive process for navigating both acute stress and general environmental conditions that do not match the conditions in which expected stress occurrence was established.