Restoring emotional stability: Cortisol effects on the neural network of cognitive emotion regulation

Acute stress improves the effectivity of cognitive emotion regulation in men

“…Moreover, cortisol secretion was positively associated with reappraisal success in men, suggesting the stress-induced improvement of cognitive reappraisal to be predominantly driven by a glucocorticoid mechanism. The present findings are consistent with previous studies demonstrating that stress and in particular the stress hormone cortisol facilitate emotion regulatory processes, especially via cognitive reappraisal 24,25 . Even though the functional role and precise mechanism of cortisol in emotional processing is still not fully understood, several www.nature.com/scientificreports/ researchers postulated a cortisol-dependent improvement of negative emotional experience 27 , phobic fear 28 as well as cognitive emotion regulation skills 25 .…”

“…Interestingly, stronger stress-induced cortisol increases also appear to mitigate the increase in negative affect that is typically observed after stress 26,32 , which might reflect a cortisol-mediated enhancement of emotion regulatory capacities. Together with these findings, our data provide preliminary support for the idea that the beneficial effects of stress on cognitive emotion regulation are mainly driven by glucocorticoid actions promoting prefrontal and inhibiting amygdala activity 25,41 which in turn may lead to reduced emotional responses.…”

“…These findings suggest that stress and its associated stress mediators may also exert beneficial effects on the ability to regulate negative emotions. For instance, a recent neuroimaging study from our lab revealed that an oral administration of cortisol indeed facilitated the downregulation of negative emotions via both distraction and cognitive reappraisal by enhancing regulatory activity in prefrontal regions and reducing emotion-related activity in the amygdala 25 . Improvement of cognitive emotion regulation after stress might thus be primarily initialized through glucocorticoids acting on cognitive control and emotion processing regions.…”

“…Recent data favors the idea that stress improves emotion regulation success 24,25 , which might be primarily mediated by cortisol 25,27 . Hence, we hypothesized that stress improves the effectivity to downregulate negative emotions, particularly via cognitive reappraisal, which should be evidenced by reduced subjective arousal, enhanced valence and success ratings as well as altered pupil dilations.…”

“…However, given the lack of research on the effects of stress on cognitive emotion regulation in general and rather mixed findings specifically regarding its impact on distraction, we did not hypothesize a specific direction of this effect. Based on studies showing that cortisol diminishes the subjective experience of negative emotions 25,26 possibly by strengthened emotion regulation processes, we expected cortisol-but not alpha-amylase-to be positively associated with emotion regulation success. Men typically show a stronger cortisol response to acute stress than women 39 .…”