(A Lack of) Sex Differences in the Effects of Acute Stress on Attentional Bias to Threat

Abstract

Attentional bias (i.e., a bias toward processing certain stimuli) can be influenced by context, motivation, and state. Prior work has suggested that stress may affect attentional bias to threat, but there is inconsistency in this work with respect to how stress influences it—if it does at all. Some evidence suggests that sex differences may exist in stress effects on attentional bias, but to date no experiment has tested this possibility. We addressed the above by investigating the effects of an acute stressor, a Zoom-adapted Trier Social Stress Test, on attentional bias to threat and positive stimuli using a facial dot-probe task (N=150, 89 women). Salivary cortisol was measured pre- and post-manipulation to verify stress induction and assess the association of cortisol with attentional bias. Although participants showed expected attentional bias to threat, we found no effect of stress nor a stress by sex interaction on attentional bias to threatening or positive stimuli. We did, however, find an interaction between stress and sex in overall reaction time, such that stressed women responded faster than control women. Associations with cortisol and computationally modeled estimates of attention will be presented. Although we observed significant attentional biases to threat as well as stress-induced differences in overall reaction time, we found no evidence indicating that stress affects behavioral indices of attentional bias in either men or women within our paradigm.