Cognitive Reserve and Anxiety Interactions Play a Fundamental Role in the Response to the Stress

Abstract

The aims of the present study were to assess the possible interaction between Cognitive Reserve (CR) and State Anxiety (SA) on adrenocortical and physiological responses in coping situations. Forty healthy, middle-aged men completed the Cognitive Reserve Scale and the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory. We used an Observational Fear Conditioning (OFC) paradigm in order to assess emotional learning and to induce stress. Electrodermal activity (EDA) and salivary cortisol concentrations were measured throughout the conditions. Our results indicate that those who indicated having higher state anxiety showed a lower capacity for learning the contingency, along with presenting higher salivary cortisol peak response following the observational fear-conditioning paradigm. The most prominent finding was the interaction between cognitive reserve and state anxiety on cortisol response to the post observational fear-conditioning paradigm. Thus, those who showed a high anxiety-state and, at the same time, a high cognitive reserve did not present an increased salivary cortisol response following the observational fear-conditioning paradigm. Given these results, we postulate that the state anxiety reported by participants, reflects emotional activation that hinders the attention needed to process and associate emotional stimuli. However, cognitive reserve has an indirect relation with conditioning, enabling better emotional learning. In this context, cognitive reserve demonstrated a protective effect on hormonal response in coping situations, when reported anxiety or emotional activation were high. These findings suggest that cognitive reserve could be used as a tool to deal with the effects of stressors in life situations, limiting development of the allostatic load.

Falling in Love With Work: The Effect of Enterprise Social Media on Thriving at Work

“…According to the theory of the cognitive interaction of stress, individuals’ understanding and evaluations of stress are influenced by external variables ( Evan et al, 2014 ). Therefore, future research on work stress should focus on clarifying the boundary conditions of these effects ( Jose et al, 2021 ). There is no empirical study that considers the use of enterprise social media as a situational variable that affects individuals’ perception of stress, and it is unclear whether enterprise social media use increases or decreases individuals’ perception of stress ( Liu and Bakici, 2019 ).…”

Cognitive reserve moderates the relationship between childhood maltreatment, objective and subjective cognition, and psychosocial functioning in individuals with first-episode psychosis.

“…The variations across CR within and between samples in the literature may be one explanation for the inconsistent findings regarding whether CM and its subtypes impact the accuracy of cognitive (Dauvermann & Donohoe, 2019) and psychosocial outcomes (Alameda et al, 2014; Christy et al, 2023; Fares-Otero, Alameda, et al, 2023) in FEP. Also, these inconsistencies could be due to individual stress responses, different coping strategies, factors of resilience (Fares-Otero, Jiaqing, et al, 2023; Nugent et al, 2014), anxiety and depressive symptoms (García-Moreno et al, 2021; Goltermann et al, 2021), and variability of cognitive and psychosocial functioning in psychotic disorders that is partially explained by genetic risk (Popovic et al, 2019; Richards et al, 2019). In addition, protective and unfavorable environmental factors and related epigenetic effects might also play a role.…”

The Impact of Moderate to High-Intensity Physical Exercise on the Perception of Negative Emotional Intensity in College Students with High Psychological Stress

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