Acute psychosocial stress impairs intention initiation in young but not older adults

Adult age differences in the psychophysiological response to acute stress

“…Importantly, like Hidalgo et al (2015), the present study used a within-subjects design with a similar sample size. However, a lower cortisol response in older adults in both TSST/control stands in contrast to previous findings showing either increased cortisol in older age or no age differences during TSST/control (Almela et al, 2011;Crosswell et al, 2021;Kudielka et al, 2004a;Schnitzspahn et al, 2022). Nevertheless, earlier work from Nicolson et al (1997) demonstrated that middle-aged adults (50 years) showed higher cortisol responses than older adults (> 70 years).…”

“…Instead of imagining applying for their dream job (i.e., instructions for younger adults), older adults had to provide argumentation for being the best candidate for a volunteering job at a club or charity group implicated in a subject that was dear to their hearts. Since the TSST was initially developed for use with younger adults, adapting the content of the oral presentation to a context that is relevant, hence valid, to older adults has been shown to successfully induce stress in older adults and is in line with previous studies using the TSST with this population (e.g., Crosswell et al, 2021;Oei et al, 2018;Schnitzspahn et al, 2022). The speech and arithmetic tasks took place in front of a camera and a jury of two experimenters (one woman, one man) wearing lab coats and keeping a strictly neutral demeanor toward the participant.…”

“…Regarding the cortisol response to acute psychosocial stress, older adults (compared to younger adults) have shown increased (Almela et al, 2011;Gotthardt et al, 1995;Kudielka et al, 2004a;Traustadóttir et al, 2005), similar (Crosswell et al, 2021;Kudielka et al, 2000;Schnitzspahn et al, 2022) or decreased (Hidalgo et al, 2015;Nicolson et al, 1997) cortisol reactivity. Participants' sex, stressor severity, or medication intake are known moderating factors (see Dickerson and Kemeny, 2004), but they do not fully explain these divergent results.…”

“…Thus, although frameworks on affective aging predict age-related differences in the evaluation of a stressor (see Lazarus and DeLongis, 1983;Young et al, 2021a), they are rarely investigated in the laboratory and supported by empirical data. Using an age-adapted version of the widely used Trier Social Stress Test (TSST, Kirschbaum et al, 1993), one study has shown that older adults appraised the TSST as less stressful than younger adults (Schnitzspahn et al, 2022).…”

Acute stress impacts reaction times in older but not in young adults in a flanker task

“…For instance, there is abundant research consistently pointing towards detrimental effects of chronic stress on diverse cognitive abilities in older adults 7 – 10 but the studies tackling short-term cognitive effects after acute stress exposure have been mostly conducted in young adults 11 – 13 . In the last decade, a growing body of research on cognitive aging has addressed the effects of acute stress on memory performance 14 – 16 , but only few studies have examined the effects of acute stress on executive functioning in older age 17 – 19 . Given the well-established contribution of executive processing to the functioning of complex daily life activities in late adulthood 20 , 21 , it is important to understand how acute stress might impact performance of older adults’ executive abilities.…”