Gender difference in neural response to psychological stress

Abstract

Gender is an important biological determinant of vulnerability to psychosocial stress. We used perfusion based functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure cerebral blood flow (CBF) responses to mild to moderate stress in 32 healthy people (16 males and 16 females). Psychological stress was elicited using mental arithmetic tasks under varying pressure. Stress in men was associated with CBF increase in the right prefrontal cortex (RPFC) and CBF reduction in the left orbitofrontal cortex (LOrF), a robust response that persisted beyond the stress task period. In contrast, stress in women primarily activated the limbic system, including the ventral striatum, putamen, insula and cingulate cortex. The asymmetric prefrontal activity in males was associated with a physiological index of stress responses-salivary cortisol, whereas the female limbic activation showed a lower degree of correlations with cortisol. Conjunction analyses indicated only a small degree of overlap between the stress networks in men and women at the threshold level of P < 0.01. Increased overlap of stress networks between the two genders was revealed when the threshold for conjunction analyses was relaxed to P < 0.05. Further, machine classification was used to differentiate the central stress responses between the two genders with over 94% accuracy. Our study may represent an initial step in uncovering the neurobiological basis underlying the contrasting health consequences of psychosocial stress in men and women.

Stress Induction and Visual Working Memory Performance: The Effects of Emotional and Non-Emotional Stimuli

“…In general, according to the results of this study, stress caused problems in various functions of visual working memory, which are consistent with the findings of other recent studies (21,22).…”

“…Some studies have reported the inhibition of working memory performance after stress (17)(18)(19)(20)(21)(22), while some have shown the improvement or lack of influence of working memory after stress (23)(24)(25)(26). The difference in the results of previous studies can be related to various factors including: type of memory (longterm memory against short-term memory), memory stage (encoding, storage, and retrieval), testing time (morning versus evening), emotional value of learned information (27,28), gender of subjects (29,30), and other factors such as age of subjects (31), one's ability to control the stressful situation (32), intensity (low, medium, or high) and the duration of exposure to the stress (33), source of stress (internal versus external), type of learning (implicit versus explicit), certain psychological properties (34), mood (35,36), personality (37), and type of individual cognitive assessment (38).…”

An investigation of boys’ and girls’ emotional experience of math, their math performance, and the relation between these variables

“…For example, the same heightened level of math anxiety might have different effects for boys and girls, and it is crucial to understand why the relation is different. Gender differences in stress responses have been observed in adult studies, for example in the study of Wang et al (2007), where stress level was manipulated by instructing participants to do either mental arithmetic or to count backward. The observed differences seem consistent with a theory that women tend to react to stress with a so-called tend-and-befriend response, whereas men seem to be more inclined to react with a fight-andflight (competitive) response.…”

Steroid and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, cognitive decline, and dementia

“…Surprisingly, genetic vulnerability has also not been considered despite a possible interactive effect between cortisol levels and apolipoproteinE allele (APOE (Lee et al, 2008). Finally, gender differences have not been examined although they have been reported in relation to both stress response and association between cortisol levels and cognitive decline and neural activity (Otte et al, 2005;Sauro et al, 2003;Seeman et al, 1997;Wang et al, 2007;Beluche et al, 2010) as well as in risk profiles for cognitive impairment and progression to dementia (Artero et al, 2008).…”