Investigating the Effects of Acute Stress on Neural Mechanisms of Self-controlled Decision-making

Successfully exerting self-control is an important prerequisite for adaptive decision-making in daily life. The experience of acute stress might impair the ability to select actions in line with personally valued long-term goals in situations where a conflict between short-term and long-term action consequences arises. In this fMRI study, we examined the effects of experimentally induced acute stress on neural and behavioral substrates of self-controlled decision-making in a large sample (n = 175). We showed that acute stress was associated with increased modulation of activation in the ventromedial PFC by anticipated action short-term consequences, suggesting that acute stress might alter the degree to which short-term consequences are incorporated into the neural valuation process, but not with decreased modulation by long-term consequences. In addition, acute stress reduced functional connectivity between ventromedial and dorsolateral PFCs during self-control conflict possibly indicating weakened recruitment of cognitive control. However, despite group differences on the neural level, acute stress did not affect the impact of anticipated short-term or long-term action consequences on behavioral decisions or participants' self-control performance. Several factors might have contributed to the results reported here, for instance, potential compensatory mechanisms employed by stressed participants. Future work is needed to address these systematically.