Elsevier

Biological Psychiatry

Volume 66, Issue 1, 1 July 2009, Pages 25-32
Biological Psychiatry

Archival Report
Acute Psychological Stress Reduces Working Memory-Related Activity in the Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2009.03.006Get rights and content

Background

Acute psychological stress impairs higher-order cognitive function such as working memory (WM). Similar impairments are seen in various psychiatric disorders that are associated with higher susceptibility to stress and with prefrontal cortical dysfunctions, suggesting that acute stress may play a potential role in such dysfunctions. However, it remains unknown whether acute stress has immediate effects on WM-related prefrontal activity.

Methods

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we investigated neural activity of 27 healthy female participants during a blocked WM task (numerical N-back) while moderate psychological stress was induced by viewing strongly aversive (vs. neutral) movie material together with a self-referencing instruction. To assess stress manipulation, autonomic and endocrine, as well as subjective, measurements were acquired throughout the experiment.

Results

Successfully induced acute stress resulted in significantly reduced WM-related activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), and was accompanied by less deactivation in brain regions that are jointly referred to as the default mode network.

Conclusions

This study demonstrates that experimentally induced acute stress in healthy volunteers results in a reduction of WM-related DLPFC activity and reallocation of neural resources away from executive function networks. These effects may be explained by supraoptimal levels of catecholamines potentially in conjunction with elevated levels of cortisol. A similar mechanism involving acute stress as a mediating factor may play an important role in higher-order cognitive deficits and hypofrontality observed in various psychiatric disorders.

Section snippets

Participants

Twenty-nine young, healthy, right-handed female university students (aged 18–25 years) with normal or corrected-to-normal vision participated in this study. Participants reported no history of neurological, psychiatric, or endocrine disease; no current use of any psychoactive drugs or corticosteroids; and no habit of watching violent movies or playing violent video games. None of them had experienced severe physical or emotional trauma. Avoiding confounds related to gender differences and

Subjective and Physiological Measurements of Stress

Subjective negative affect scores at different time points are shown in Figure 1B for the two groups. A 2-by-3 ANOVA with group as the between-subjects factor and time as the within-subjects factor (three post-baseline time points) revealed significant main effects of group [F(1,25) = 18.56, p < .001] and time [F(2,24) = 12.31, p < .001], and a significant interaction effect [F(2,24) = 7.56, p < .003], indicating that stress induction resulted in significantly increased negative affect.

Discussion

We aimed to investigate stress-induced modulations in WM-related prefrontal activity. Results confirmed our hypothesis of reduced WM-related activation in the DLPFC. This reduction was accompanied by less deactivation of brain structures within the DMN. As indicated by increased HR and decreased HRV, our stress induction procedure resulted in a shift toward more sympathetic, and less parasympathetic, autonomic nervous system activity. Moreover, stress induction increased HPA axis activity as

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