Gender moderates the association between chronic academic stress with top-down and bottom-up attention

Bradley J. Wright,Kira-Elise Wilson,Michael Kingsley,Johannes Siegrist,Jian Li,Ben Horan,Paul Maruff

doi:10.3758/s13414-022-02454-x

Abstract

Research on the relationship between chronic stress and cognition is limited by a lack of concurrent measurement of state-anxiety, physiological arousal, and gender. For the first time, we assessed the impact of these factors on top-down/conscious (simple and choice reaction time) and bottom-up/reflexive (saccadic reaction time) measures of attention using CONVIRT virtual-reality cognitive tests. Participants (N = 163) completed measures of academic stress (effort-reward imbalance; ERI) and state-anxiety while heart-rate variability was recorded continuously throughout the experiment. Gender moderated the association between academic stress with the top-down measures (b = -0.002, t = -2.023, p = .045; b = -0.063, t = -3.080, p = .002) and higher academic stress was associated with poorer/slower reaction times only for male participants. For bottom-up attention, heart rate variability moderated the relationship between academic stress and saccadic reaction time (b = 0.092, t = 1.991, p = .048), and only female participants who were more stressed (i.e., ERI ≥ 1) and displayed stronger sympathetic dominance had slower reaction times. Our findings align with emerging evidence that chronic stress is related to hyperarousal in women and cognitive decrements in men. Our findings suggest that higher ERI and sympathetic dominance during cognitive testing was associated with poorer bottom-up attention in women, whereas for men, academic stress was related with poorer top-down attention irrespective of sympathovagal balance.

Highlights

Performance on standard neuropsychological tests may be impacted by state anxiety (Dorenkamp & Vik, 2018) and chronic stress (Kuhnell et al, 2020; Landolt et al, 2017)
After successfully attaching the heart rate monitor, participants were seated in a quiet testing room and completed a questionnaire pack comprising a demographics survey, the effort-reward imbalance (ERI)-U, the STAI-6, and the POMS ‘vigor’ and ‘fatigue’ scales
The baseline phase enabled the collection of baseline heart rate variability data, while minimising the potential impact of anticipatory arousal on cognitive performance – a phenomenon that we have previously observed in a similar study design (Kuhnell et al, 2020)

Summary

Introduction

Performance on standard neuropsychological tests may be impacted by state anxiety (Dorenkamp & Vik, 2018) and chronic stress (Kuhnell et al, 2020; Landolt et al, 2017). As these factors have been rarely considered concurrently, it is, Gender. There is a larger literature that suggests that the effects of anxiety upon cognition are not gender-specific (Dorenkamp & Vik, 2018). It is unknown, if the relationship between chronic stress and measures of attention are moderated by gender

Methods

Results

Conclusion