Effects of acute psychosocial stress on neural activity to emotional and neutral faces in a face recognition memory paradigm

Abstract

Previous studies have shown that acute psychosocial stress impairs recognition of declarative memory and that emotional material is especially sensitive to this effect. Animal studies suggest a central role of the amygdala which modulates memory processes in hippocampus, prefrontal cortex and other brain areas. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate neural correlates of stress-induced modulation of emotional recognition memory in humans. Twenty-seven healthy, right-handed, non-smoker male volunteers performed an emotional face recognition task. During encoding, participants were presented with 50 fearful and 50 neutral faces. One hour later, they underwent either a stress (Trier Social Stress Test) or a control procedure outside the scanner which was followed immediately by the recognition session inside the scanner, where participants had to discriminate between 100 old and 50 new faces. Stress increased salivary cortisol, blood pressure and pulse, and decreased the mood of participants but did not impact recognition memory. BOLD data during recognition revealed a stress condition by emotion interaction in the left inferior frontal gyrus and right hippocampus which was due to a stress-induced increase of neural activity to fearful and a decrease to neutral faces. Functional connectivity analyses revealed a stress-induced increase in coupling between the right amygdala and the right fusiform gyrus, when processing fearful as compared to neutral faces. Our results provide evidence that acute psychosocial stress affects medial temporal and frontal brain areas differentially for neutral and emotional items, with a stress-induced privileged processing of emotional stimuli.

Effects of Acute Psychosocial Stress on Facial Emotion Recognition

“…This is in line with previous findings demonstrating enhancement in emotion recognition on various emotional expressions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise) in healthy participants as well as in patients with borderline personality disorder following the TSST (Deckers et al, 2015). However, some studies did not show enhancement in emotion recognition following exposure to acute stress (for example, Li et al, 2014). Future studies should pursue investigating the specific conditions under which the enhancement in emotion recognition takes place.…”

Stress Response to the Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Environment in Healthy Adults Relates to the Degree of Limbic Reactivity during Emotion Processing

“…It is possible that anticipatory stress prior to entering the fMRI environment affects the ability of subjects to perform at an optimal level during an emotion challenge [48]. However, consistent with other studies [49], cortisol was not found to relate to task performance. Future investigations can more explicitly challenge specific emotions (i.e.…”

Stress attenuates the flexible updating of aversive value

“…The extant research on stress and flexible affective control suggests two primary ways through which these impairments might occur. First, evidence suggests that stress exposure enhances affective responses and impairs emotional control when presented with stimuli such as emotional faces (17,18), negative images (19,20), and aversive stimuli (21)(22)(23). This suggests that stress could potentially enhance threat responses to the new CS+ that predicts shock, or prompt sustained threat responses to a newly safe cue, leading to a failure to extinguish threat responses to the new CS− (24).…”