Cortisol reactivity and emotional memory after psychosocial stress in oral contraceptive users

Abstract

Oral contraceptive (OC) users typically show a blunted or no cortisol response to psychosocial stress. Although most OC regimens include both an inactive (dummy) and active pill phase, studies have not systematically investigated cortisol responses during these pill phases. Further, high levels of cortisol following a stressor diminish retrieval of emotional material, but the effects of stress on memory among OC users are poorly understood. We examined the effects of a psychosocial stressor, the Trier Social Stress Test, versus a control condition on cortisol responsivity and emotional memory retrieval in women tested either during their active (n=18) or inactive pill phase (n = 21). In secondary analyses, we quantitatively compared OC users to normally cycling women and showed a significant lack of cortisol response during both active and inactive pill phase. Emotional recall did not differ between active and inactive pill phases. Stress differentially diminished recall of negative words compared to positive or neutral words, but cortisol levels were unrelated to memory performance. These findings indicate that OC users have distinct cortisol and memory responses to stress that are similar between the active and inactive pill phases.

Cognitive Control and Flexibility in the Context of Stress and Depressive Symptoms: The Cognitive Control and Flexibility Questionnaire

“…Results without this procedure are presented in Supplementary Material (Supplementary Analyses: Study 3). Furthermore, as oral contraceptives can influence cortisol responses to a stressor (e.g., Kirschbaum et al, 1999 ; Mordecai et al, 2017 ), this variable was treated as a covariate in analyses concerning cortisol response.…”

Effects of corticosterone on mild auditory fear conditioning and extinction; role of sex and training paradigm

“…Interestingly, the use of oral contraceptives has been shown to affect HPA axis responsiveness during stress exposure in females, resulting in a blunted cortisol response and a lack of stress-induced effects on memory (Cornelisse et al 2011;Mordecai et al 2017). Aside from sex-specific differences in stress sensitivity or responsivity (Loi et al 2017), in the human population, the effects of stress-induced glucocorticoid release on memory may therefore differ between men and women in part because of the high use of oral contraceptives by females.…”

Effects of Oral Contraceptive Androgenicity on Visuospatial and Social-Emotional Cognition: A Prospective Observational Trial

“…A small body of work has demonstrated that OC users have a blunted salivary cortisol responsivity, relative to OC nonusers, following laboratory stressors (e.g., the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) psychosocial stress paradigm) [38,39]. OC users demonstrate a pattern whereby salivary cortisol levels remain high, relative to OC nonusers, across a control and stressor (TSST) condition (i.e., a lack of a cortisol response following the stressor), and this effect is maintained during both the active and inactive pill phases [40]. In relation to emotion recognition, OC users have been demonstrated to have less accurate recognition of negative and complex emotional expressions as compared to nonusers in some studies [41][42][43] but not others [44].…”