Cortisol rapidly affects amplitudes of heartbeat-evoked brain potentials—Implications for the contribution of stress to an altered perception of physical sensations?

Altered Patterns of Heartbeat-Evoked Potentials in Depersonalization/Derealization Disorder

“…The order was counterbalanced across participants. Although findings from earlier studies suggest no main effect of open versus closed eyes on HEPs (19,47), this design was intended to retest this hypothesis in an a priori fashion. Participants were unaware during this phase that the later experimental task would involve their attention-focus on heartbeats.…”

“…Epochs with nonstereotyped artifacts (e.g., electrode cable movements, swallowing, etc) were excluded from further analysis. As described in previous studies on HEPs (19,22,47,50), eye blink correction was carried out using the Gratton-Coles algorithm (51). EEG analysis was performed with Brain Vision Analyzer 2.0 (Brain Products, Munich, Germany).…”

“…HEPs can be found with or without the conscious perception of heartbeats. Because afferent signals from the cardiovascular system continuously reach cortical structures, HEP amplitudes assessed during rest can be interpreted as indicators of central nervous system representation of cardiac interoceptive signals independent of active awareness of cardiac sensations (19,20). When assessed during a heartbeat perception task, HEP amplitudes are correlated with heartbeat perception accuracy (21)(22)(23), motivation to perform in those tasks (24), and attentional focus on heartbeats (25)(26)(27).…”

“…Both physiological stress axes may be involved in this process: first, peripheral sympathetic activation may drive the cardiovascular system and, therefore, increase the afferent neurotransmission from cardiac interoceptors (e.g., baroreceptors), as implied by increased interoceptive accuracy by selective β 1 -adrenergic drugs (36). Second, cortisol levels have been demonstrated to affect the cortical representation (19) and perception of bodily sensations (37)(38)(39). It could be argued, therefore, that dysregulation of the respective stress axes contributes to altered perception of bodily signals in DPD.…”

Higher chronic psychological stress is associated with blunted affective responses to strenuous resistance exercise: RPE, pleasure, pain

“…Psychological stress is similar to exercise in that it results in magnified somatic sensations, like arousal (Schulz et al, 2013). However, acute mental stress (Rief & Barsky, 2005), injections of cortisol (Miller, McKinney, Kanter, Korte, & Lovallo, 2011) and exercise may all initially dampen affective responses, such as pain, perhaps by increasing b-endorphin (Tsigos & Chrousos, 2002), a phenomenon that has been evolutionarily conserved (Sapolsky, 2004).…”