Abstract
Emotion regulation is crucial for coping with stressors but in turn can also be influenced by stress. Initial studies provided mixed evidence showing either beneficial or impairing stress effects on cognitive emotion regulation depending on stress timing, sex or the regulatory strategy. Here, we investigated the impact of acute stress on different emotion regulation strategies in men and women. N = 118 healthy participants were subjected to the Trier Social Stress Test or a control condition after which they completed an emotion regulation paradigm, requiring them to regulate their emotions in response to negative pictures using reappraisal or distraction. Cortisol levels were repeatedly measured to quantify changes in HPA axis activity. Affective ratings and pupil dilation served to measure emotion regulation success and the cognitive effort to regulate emotions. Stress reduced arousal and increased valence and success ratings for reappraisal in men, whereas no significant stress effects were found in women. Moreover, stressed men displayed a significant expansion of pupil diameter during reappraisal suggesting enhanced cognitive regulatory engagement, which ultimately may have led to better emotion regulation outcomes. Cortisol secretion positively correlated with subjective reappraisal success in men, suggesting a glucocorticoid-driven mechanism that may promote emotion regulatory performance in the aftermath of stress.
Highlights
Investigating the direct impact of acute stress on emotion regulation processes are scarce
We investigated the effects of acute stress on the effectivity of cognitive emotion regulation in males, females taking oral contraceptives and free-cycling females
Cortisol secretion was positively associated with reappraisal success in men, suggesting the stress-induced improvement of cognitive reappraisal to be predominantly driven by a glucocorticoid mechanism
Summary
Investigating the direct impact of acute stress on emotion regulation processes are scarce. Since deliberate emotion regulation could be cognitively demanding, the reduction in prefrontal functioning under acute stress states might lead to diminished emotion regulatory success In line with this hypothesis, first evidence provided by our laboratory[24] demonstrated that stressed participants relative to controls were less effectively distracted from emotional pictures through a parallel arithmetic task. McRae et al.[33] showed that men exhibited less increases in prefrontal activity and greater decreases in the amygdala than women when applying reappraisal to downregulate negative emotions These findings suggest that men may expend less regulatory effort due to a greater use of automatic emotion regulation leading to enhanced neural efficiency. We hypothesized that the impact of stress on emotional downregulation is more pronounced in male participants
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