Acute psychosocial stress and everyday moral decision-making in young healthy men: The impact of cortisol

How Cortisol Reactivity Influences Prosocial Decision-Making: The Moderating Role of Sex and Empathic Concern

“…To our surprise, we did not observe such responses in our female participants in any of the social decision-making tasks. These findings are in keeping with previous research, which revealed that men had a tend-and-befriend tendency under stress (e.g., von Dawans et al, 2012;Sollberger et al, 2016), or a positive association between the cortisol response and men's prosocial behaviors (e.g., Berger et al, 2016;Sollberger et al, 2016;Singer et al, 2017;Margittai et al, 2018). However, our data contrast with other research which linked stress or cortisol reactivity with individuals' selfishness, sense of competition and less generosity (Vinkers et al, 2013;Nickels et al, 2017).…”

“…Apart from merely comparing the differences of individuals' behaviors between the stress and control group, several studies further explored the impact of stress-induced cortisol elevation on decision-making behaviors, but failed to consider the role of sex. For example, Singer et al (2017) found positive associations between the magnitude of cortisol level and men's altruistic decision-making behaviors, but women were not included as participants. In a study that failed to observe a significant difference in men's decision-making between the stress group and control group, the authors found a negative correlation between cortisol reactivity and altruistic decisions in the high-emotional moral dilemmas (Starcke et al, 2011).…”

Acute stress alters neural patterns of value representation for others

“…Thus, stress appears to increase reward sensitivity for another person. This would be in line with converging evidence from behavioral research indicating that stress increases prosocial behavior [1][2][3][4][5][6] , which has been interpreted in light of the "tend-and-befriend" hypothesis stating that individuals become more prosocial under stress in order to secure help from others 7 . Furthermore, previous research has shown that stress increases the magnitude of brain activity in empathy for pain areas when viewing others in pain which predicted later prosocial behavior 8 .…”

“…Our lives are filled with various stressors and many social interactions occur when individuals are under stress. While intuitively many people assume that stress increases selfishness and egocentric behavior, converging evidence from behavioral research indicates that stress can also increase prosocial behavior [1][2][3][4][5][6] . This has been interpreted in light of the "tend-and-befriend" hypothesis stating that individuals become more prosocial under stress in order to secure help from others 7 .…”

“…This has been interpreted in light of the "tend-and-befriend" hypothesis stating that individuals become more prosocial under stress in order to secure help from others 7 . While originally the hypothesis proposed that such a "tend-and-befriend" behavior represents an alternative stress response of women (as opposed to the classic "fight-or-flight" response, which was suggested to represent a male stress response), empirical evidence so far suggests that also men engage in "tend-and-befriend" behavior when under stress [1][2][3]5 . Thus, "tend-and-befriend" might represent a more general human stress response.…”