Impact of Chronic Stress on Attention Control: Evidence from Behavioral and Event-Related Potential Analyses

Abstract

Chronic stress affects brain function, so assessing its hazards is important for mental health. To overcome the limitations of behavioral data, we combined behavioral and event-related potentials (ERPs) in an attention network task. This task allowed us to differentiate between three specific aspects of attention: alerting, orienting, and execution. Forty-one participants under chronic stress and 31 non-stressed participants were enrolled. On the performance level, the chronically stressed group showed a significantly slower task response and lower accuracy. Concerning ERP measures, smaller cue-N1, cue-N2, and larger cue-P3 amplitudes were found in the stressed group, indicating that this group was less able to assign attention to effective information, i.e., they made inefficient use of cues and had difficulty in maintaining alerting. In addition, the stressed group showed larger target-N2 amplitudes, indicating that this group needed to allocate more cognitive resources to deal with the conflict targets task. Subgroup analysis revealed lower target-P3 amplitudes in the stressed than in the non-stressed group. Group differences associated with the attention networks were found at the ERP level. In the stressed group, excessive depletion of resources led to changes in attention control. In this study, we examined the effects of chronic stress on individual executive function from a neurological perspective. The results may benefit the development of interventions to improve executive function in chronically stressed individuals.

Chronic stress is associated with reduced mindful acceptance skills but not with mindful attention monitoring: a cross-sectional study.

“…For example, monitoring may be a function of working memory, instead of attention, as defined by Petersen and Posner (2012). Future studies may further investigate the association between chronic stress and attention monitoring, adding to the limited existing literature (e.g., Liu et al, 2020).…”

“…It has strong construct validity and reliability across gender, socioeconomic status, age groups, ethnicity, and other demographic characteristics (Cohen et al, 1983). The PSS is widely used in studies investigating chronic stress (e.g., Pompon et al, 2019) and is employed in one of the few existing studies of the association between monitoring and chronic stress (Liu et al, 2020).…”

“…The ANT was specifically designed to measure performance in these attentional subsystems. Moreover, the ANT is used in the few existing studies of the association between monitoring and chronic stress (e.g., Liu et al, 2020). The duration of the ANT task is 25 minutes.…”

“…This may imply that these functions are impaired in chronically stressed people and that "improvements" of these functions may underlie the positive effect of MBIs for stress reduction (Creswell and Lindsay, 2014). However, only preliminary evidence directly supports the idea that monitoring, or acceptance are impaired in chronically stressed groups (e.g., Allen et al, 2017;Järvelä-Reijonen et al, 2020;Liu et al, 2020;Oken et al, 2011). Yet, a vast literature shows that stress can generally impact cognition (e.g., working memory, interference inhibition) and emotion regulation, and vice-versa.…”

COVID-19 Related Stress and Emotion Regulation: An Examination of their Effect on Sleep, Dreaming, and Social Cognition.

“…One possible explanation for the current finding is that COVID-related stress placed an excessive demand on participants attentional capacity, which resulted in an impairment in recognition. In support of this explanation, research has revealed that stressors can significantly reduce attentional network capacity and attenuate performance on tasks that require continuous attention (Liu et al, 2020). This effect is typically produced as even mildly stressful events can increase glucocorticoid and monoaminergic release, which subsequently impairs the neuronal firing and cortical-connectivity of the pre-frontal cortex (PFC), an area of the brain associated with higher order cognitive functions, such as attention and memory (Arnsten, 2009).…”