Acute psychosocial stress during retrieval impairs pattern separation processes on an episodic memory task

Nitschke, Jonas P.; Giorgio, Lisa-Marie; Zaborowska, Oliwia

doi:10.1080/10253890.2020.1724946

Cited by 12 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…Under stressful circumstances, people often fall short of their cognitive capabilities, which, of course, can carry numerous adverse consequences, such as being unable to maintain healthy lifestyle choices (Schneiderman et al, 2005) or underperforming in the decisive moment of an important competition (Yu, 2015). Indeed, a large body of work reveals that important cognitive capacities such as learning, memory, and decision-making are diminished by acute stress (Nitschke et al, 2020; Porcelli & Delgado, 2017; Schwabe & Wolf, 2013; Wirz et al, 2018), possibly because of a more fundamental stress-induced impairment to constituent cognitive processes, including working memory and set shifting (Bogdanov & Schwabe, 2016; Shields et al, 2016). Integrating these observations across behavioral repertoires, recent accounts have proposed that acute stress results in a shift away from flexible, effortful behavior toward more primitive and rigid, but less cognitively demanding, forms of control (Otto et al, 2013; Schwabe & Wolf, 2013; Wirz et al, 2018).…”

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confidence: 99%

Acute Psychosocial Stress Increases Cognitive-Effort Avoidance

et al. 2021

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Adverse effects following acute stress are traditionally thought to reflect functional impairments of central executive-dependent cognitive-control processes. However, recent evidence demonstrates that cognitive-control application is perceived as effortful and aversive, indicating that stress-related decrements in cognitive performance could denote decreased motivation to expend effort instead. To investigate this hypothesis, we tested 40 young, healthy individuals (20 female, 20 male) under both stress and control conditions in a 2-day study that had a within-subjects design. Cognitive-effort avoidance was assessed using the demand-selection task, in which participants chose between performing low-demand and high-demand variants of a task-switching paradigm. We found that acute stress indeed increased participants’ preference for less demanding behavior, whereas task-switching performance remained intact. Additional Bayesian and multiverse analyses confirmed the robustness of this effect. Our findings provide novel insights into how stressful experiences shape behavior by modulating our motivation to employ cognitive control.

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confidence: 99%

Acute Psychosocial Stress Increases Cognitive-Effort Avoidance

et al. 2021

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“…Our findings are consistent with this idea: If stress facilitates vigilance to contextual cues, and especially threat, then one would expect enhanced attention to, and processing of, the negative emotional experiences conveyed by our empathic accuracy targets. Here, it is interesting to note research showing that stress impairs set-shifting (Shields et al, 2016) and, more generally, is thought to undermine flexible and/or effortful behaviours (Nitschke, Giorgio, et al, 2020;Otto et al, 2013;Steinhauser et al, 2007;Wirz et al, 2018) . The empathic accuracy task, however, requires cognitive flexibility as participants must continually update their ratings as the target's emotional state evolves over time.…”

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confidence: 97%

Stress and Stress-induced Glucocorticoids Facilitate Empathic Accuracy in Men, with no Effects for Women

Jp¹,

Pruessner²,

Ja³

2021

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Empathy, the ability to understand what others are feeling, is critical for social connection and navigating our social world. We investigated the effects of acute stress on cognitive empathy. Given that acute stress, and resulting increased glucocorticoid, triggers a shift in two large-scale brain networks, prioritizing the salience over the executive control network, we predicted that stress would facilitate empathic accuracy (EA). We also investigated the effect of gender/sex, given evidence of differential stress reactivity. Results from two independent studies (N= 267; 2,256 observations) showed that acute stress facilitated EA for men, an effect that was partly driven by their glucocorticoid response. Conversely, stress had no effect for women, who also slowed a blunted cortisol response. Moreover, exploratory analyses revealed that women taking oral contraceptives, in general, performed worse on the EA task than regularly cycling women. This research highlights the important, but complex, role of stress in cognitive empathy.

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“…One way to interpret this is that while in no-stress situations it may be adaptive to approach every new social interaction as a blank state, under acute stress the stakes for doing so might be higher, consequently shifting decision making to be more conservative. Another interpretation is that the integration of novel information during acute stress is impaired (Nitschke et al, 2020a(Nitschke et al, , 2019Schwabe and Wolf, 2012) which could possibly result in misinterpretation of the available data. However, specific mechanisms that highlight how acute stress impairs information processing for social decision making in the context of economic games is still unclear.…”

Section: Variations In the Dependent Variablementioning

confidence: 99%

Does Stress Make Us More—or Less—Prosocial? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Acute Stress on Prosocial Behaviours Using Economic Games.

Nitschke¹,

Forbes²,

Lamm³

2022

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Prosocial behaviour is fundamental for our social togetherness. Yet, how acute stress, a common everyday occurrence, influences our behaviours towards one another is still unclear. In this systematic review and meta-analysis, we aimed to quantitatively investigate the effect of experimentally induced acute stress on prosocial behaviours in economic games. We also probed possible moderators to explain differences in findings. We included 23 studies, 77 individual effects, and 2197 participants in the meta-analysis and found no overall differences between stress and control groups in prosocial behaviours (SMD=-0.04), or costly punishment (SMD=-0.11). While we found significant heterogeneity in the reported research findings, there were no moderating effects of participants’ gender/sex, paradigm design-choices, and the type of stressor did not play a role in explaining divergent effects. The results of this meta-analysis suggest that there is currently no clear answer to the question of whether or not stress increases or decreases prosociality. We highlight important open questions and suggest where the field should go next.

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Acute psychosocial stress during retrieval impairs pattern separation processes on an episodic memory task

Cited by 12 publications

References 45 publications

Acute Psychosocial Stress Increases Cognitive-Effort Avoidance

Acute Psychosocial Stress Increases Cognitive-Effort Avoidance

Stress and Stress-induced Glucocorticoids Facilitate Empathic Accuracy in Men, with no Effects for Women

Does Stress Make Us More—or Less—Prosocial? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Acute Stress on Prosocial Behaviours Using Economic Games.

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