Key result
Acute psychosocial stress reduces reward-sensitive delta neural responses to feedback.
Why the study?
The associations between stress and reward sensitivity remain poorly understood despite links to multiple forms of psychopathology.
Does acute psychosocial stress alter neural responses to reward-related feedback and cortisol levels in male participants?
Does acute psychosocial stress alter neural responses to reward-related feedback and cortisol levels in male participants?
Acute psychosocial stress blunts neural reward responses, and baseline reward sensitivity predicts the cortisol stress response, suggesting a link between reward circuitry and stress resilience.
Answers are grounded in this paper and cite their sources.
Blunted reward processing under stress suggests resilience markers; leaves open whether enhancing baseline delta activity improves cortisol regulation.
Both abnormal stress and reward responsivity are consistently linked to multiple forms of psychopathology; however, the nature of the associations between stress and reward sensitivity remains poorly understood. The present study examined associations between the HPA axis stress response and event-related potentials sensitive to the receipt of reward-related feedback in a pre-post experimental paradigm. Neural responses were recorded while male participants completed a simple monetary reward guessing task before and after the Montreal Imaging Stress Task. Results demonstrated that acute psychosocial stress significantly reduced the magnitude of neural responses to feedback in the reward-sensitive delta, but not the loss-sensitive theta, frequency band. In addition, a larger delta frequency response to rewards at baseline predicted reduced overall cortisol response in the stress condition. These findings suggest, therefore, that neural reward circuitry may be associated with both risk for and resilience to stress-related psychopathology.
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Ethridge et al. (2020) studied this question. Acute psychosocial stress (Montreal Imaging Stress Task) vs. Baseline (pre-stress) was evaluated on Neural responses to feedback in the reward-sensitive delta and loss-sensitive theta frequency bands, and salivary cortisol response. Acute psychosocial stress significantly reduced neural responses to feedback in the reward-sensitive delta frequency band, while larger baseline delta responses predicted reduced cortisol response.
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