Montreal Imaging Stress Task Research Articles

The interaction of oxytocin and nicotine addiction on psychosocial stress: an fMRI study

The anxiolytic effect of oxytocin (OXT) on psychosocial stress has been well documented, but the effectiveness under the interference of other factors still requires in-depth research. Previous studies have shown that nicotine addiction interacts with OXT on psychosocial stress on the behavioral level. However, the underlying neural mechanism of interaction between OXT and nicotine addiction on psychosocial stress has not been examined, and we conducted two experiments to reveal it. Firstly, after intranasal administration of randomized OXT or placebo (saline), a group of healthy participants (n = 27) and a group of smokers (n = 26) completed the Montreal Imaging Stress Task (MIST) in an MRI scanner. Secondly, a group of smokers (n = 22) was recruited to complete a transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) experiment, in which anodal tDCS was applied on subjects’ anterior right superior temporal gyrus (rSTG). In both experiment, subjective stress ratings, salivary cortisol samples and the amount of daily cigarette consumption were obtained from each participant. Analysis of variance were applied on both behavioral and neural data to examine the effects of OXT and nicotine addiction, and correlation analysis were used to examine relationships between neural and behavioral data. In first fMRI experiment, analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed an interaction of OXT and nicotine addiction on subjective stress. In smokers, OXT failed to suppress the elevation of subjective stress and craving ratings after psychosocial stress. A voxel-wise ANOVA of fMRI data identified an interaction between OXT and nicotine addiction in anterior rSTG, and its functional connectivity with right middle frontal gyrus. Correlations between this functional connectivity and subjective psychosocial stress were also found abnormal in smokers. In second tDCS experiment, we found that under tDCS, OXT successfully suppressed the elevation of subjective stress and craving ratings after stress. In summary, we found that nicotine addiction blocked OXT’s anxiolytic on psychosocial stress, which was related to abnormalities in anterior rSTG. By applying anodal tDCS on anterior rSTG, OXT’s anxiolytic effect was restored in smokers. These findings will support further development on oxytocin’s intervention of psychosocial stress in nicotine addiction, and provides essential information for indicating OXT’s effectiveness.

Stress in Musicians with and Without Focal Dystonia Is Not Reflected in Limbic Circuit Activation.

Musicians' dystonia (MD) is a movement disorder with several established risk factors, but the exact pathophysiology remains unknown. Recent research suggests dysfunction in sensory-motor, basal ganglia, cerebellar, and limbic loops as potential causes. Adverse childhood experiences are also considered risk factors. This study aimed to investigate whether MD patients have experienced more childhood trauma, leading to increased stress reactivity and neural vulnerability to movement disorders. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging and the Montreal Imaging Stress Task, 40 MD patients were compared with 39 healthy musicians (HMs). Whole-brain analysis and regions of interest analysis were performed. Parameter estimates and subjective stress levels were compared between groups and correlated with the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire. MD patients reported significantly higher childhood trauma scores than healthy control subjects, but they did not differ in their subjective stress experiences. Stress-related activity of limbic areas was neither found in the whole sample nor between the two groups. Instead, increased activity of visual association and temporal areas was observed, but this activation did not differ between patients and HMs. However, patients showed a tendency toward reduced precuneus activity under stress. Adverse childhood experiences were negatively correlated with precuneus, thalamus, and substantia nigra activity across all participants. Overall, MD patients and HMs had similar subjective and neurological reactions to stress but differed in childhood trauma experiences and precuneus activity under stress. Further research about the functional connectivity between precuneus, cerebellum, thalamus, and basal ganglia in musicians is needed. © 2024 The Author(s). Movement Disorders published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of International Parkinson and Movement Disorder Society.

Impact of psychosocial stress on facial emotion recognition in schizophrenia and controls: an experimental study in a forensic sample.

Psychotic disorders have been associated with dysregulated stress reactions and adaptation. Little is known about the neuroendocrine responses to psychosocial stress in justice-involved individuals with schizophrenia. Using an experimental research design, the present study aims to examine differences in the subjective and neuroendocrine responses to psychosocial stress and its impact on facial emotion recognition (FER) and performance on an arithmetic task in chronically ill justice-involved individuals with schizophrenia (PAT) and a healthy control group. PAT undergoing treatment in forensic psychiatric inpatient wards (n = 17) and a healthy control group (n = 17) were assessed regarding sociodemographic and clinical characteristics. Additionally, salivary cortisol levels, measured before and after performing a psychosocial stress task [Montreal Imaging Stress Task (MIST)], and performance on an arithmetic problem-solving task and two FER tasks were recorded. Two participants dropped out, one from each group. Therefore, the final sample consisted of 32 individuals. Significant group differences in FER were recorded. There was a significant rise in subjective perception of momentary strain relating to the induction of psychosocial stress in both groups. Notably, the pre-stress level of subjective strain was higher in the PAT group than controls. Acute psychosocial stress induced an increase in FER performance in a sub-task related to naming emotions in individuals with schizophrenia spectrum disorder. The results underline the importance of psychosocial and therapeutic interventions aimed at strengthening stress resilience in individuals with schizophrenia spectrum disorders.

Altered fronto-limbic-motor response to stress differs between functional and epileptic seizures in a TBI model

Background and ObjectivesPsychogenic nonepileptic (functional) seizures (FS) clinically resemble epileptic seizures (ES) with both often preceded by traumatic brain injury (TBI). FS and ES emergence and occurrence after TBI may be linked to aberrant neurobehavioral stress responses. We hypothesized that neural activity signatures in response to a psychosocial stress task would differ between TBI + FS and TBI + ES after controlling for TBI status (TBI-only). MethodsIn the current multicenter study, participants were recruited prospectively from Rhode Island Hospital, Providence Rhode Island Veterans Administration Medical Center, and the University of Alabama at Birmingham Medical Center. Previous diagnoses of TBI, ES, and FS were verified based on data collected from participants, medical chart and record review, and, where indicated, results of EEG and/or video-EEG confirmatory diagnosis. TBI + ES (N = 21) and TBI + FS (N = 21) were matched for age and sex and combined into an initial group (TBI + SZ; N = 42). A TBI-only group (N = 42) was age and sex matched to the TBI with seizures (TBI + SZ) group. All participants completed an fMRI control math task (CMT) and stress math task (SMT) based on the Montreal Imaging Stress Task (MIST). ResultsThe TBI + SZ group (n = 24 female) did not differ in mood or anxiety severity compared to TBI-only group (n = 24 female). However, TBI + FS group (n = 11 female) reported greater severity of these symptoms compared to TBI + ES (n = 13 female). The linear mixed effects analysis identified neural responses that differed between TBI-only and TBI + SZ during math performance within the left premotor cortex and during auditory feedback within bilateral prefrontal cortex and hippocampus/amygdala regions. Additionally, neural responses differed between TBI + ES and TBI + FS during math performance within the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and bilateral amygdala during auditory feedback within the supplementary motor area. All tests comparing neural stress responses to psychiatric symptom severity failed to reach significance. DiscussionControlling for TBI and seizure status, these findings implicate specific nodes within frontal, limbic, and sensorimotor networks that may maintain functional neurological symptoms and possibly distinguish FS from ES. This study provides class II evidence of differences in neural responses to psychosocial stress between ES and FS after TBI.

Sex differences in neural response to an acute stressor in individuals with an alcohol use disorder.

Alcohol use disorder (AUD) and stress influence overlapping neural circuits in the brain. The literature is mixed regarding the presence of sex differences in the neural response to acute stressors, and this issue has not been examined in individuals with AUD. We validated a stress functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) paradigm in individuals with AUD and tested for sex differences. Twenty-five treatment-seeking individuals with AUD (15M/10F) were recruited to participate in the neuroimaging study linked to a clinical trial of ibudilast (NCT03594435). To assess social-evaluative stress, participants completed the Montreal Imaging Stress Task (MIST). Whole brain and amygdala region-of-interest analyses were conducted. Subjective ratings of anxiety and distress were collected. Repeated measures ANCOVAs were performed to evaluate the effect of stress on anxiety and distress and to evaluate sex differences. There were trend-level effects of stress on anxiety ratings and amygdala activation (p's = 0.06). There was a significant effect of stress in the bilateral thalamus, ventral tegmental area, and paracingulate (Z's > 4.09, p's < 0.03). There was a trend-level effect of sex on subjective ratings of stress (p's = 0.07). Females had higher amygdala activation in response to stress (p = 0.02). Females also had greater activation than males in the precuneus, posterior cingulate cortex, and right inferior frontal gyrus during acute stress (Z's > 3.56, p's < 0.03). This study provides an initial validation of the MIST in a sample of individuals with AUD. It also provides preliminary evidence of sex differences in the response to social-evaluative stress, which is important, given the relevance of stress and negative emotionality as motivators for alcohol use in females.

Machine learning-based stress classification system using wearable sensor devices

&lt;p&gt;University students often become victims of high-stress levels due to the highly competitive work environment. Unmonitored stress levels in students can inflict severe physiological health problems. This work aims to build a stress classification framework using wearable sensor devices to predict mental stress levels for undergraduate engineering students. It comprises a study to collect a data set of 23 university students using wearable devices for four physiological signals, i.e., electroencephalogram (EEG), electrodermal activity (EDA), skin temperature (SKT), and heart rate (HR), when the students perform the montreal imaging stress task (MIST) for the mental workload. The machine learning models proposed in this work help classify stress into three levels: rest, moderate, and high. The models achieve a classification accuracy of 99.98% using the EEG signals’ time-frequency domain features and an accuracy of 99.51% using the EDA, HR, and SKT signals. The proposed models achieve better scores than all the previous studies on stress classification, using EEG signals and EDA, HR, and SKT signals. This study is novel since it also demonstrates the applicability and proficiency of wearable sensor devices in developing accurate stress classification models to help build real-time stress monitoring systems.&lt;/p&gt;

Acute Stress Increases Striatal Connectivity With Cortical Regions Enriched for μ and κ Opioid Receptors

BackgroundUnderstanding the neurobiological effects of stress is critical for addressing the etiology of major depressive disorder (MDD). Using a dimensional approach involving individuals with differing degree of MDD risk, we investigated 1) the effects of acute stress on cortico-cortical and subcortical-cortical functional connectivity (FC) and 2) how such effects are related to gene expression and receptor maps. MethodsAcross 115 participants (37 control, 39 remitted MDD, 39 current MDD), we evaluated the effects of stress on FC during the Montreal Imaging Stress Task. Using partial least squares regression, we investigated genes whose expression in the Allen Human Brain Atlas was associated with anatomical patterns of stress-related FC change. Finally, we correlated stress-related FC change maps with opioid and GABAA (gamma-aminobutyric acid A) receptor distribution maps derived from positron emission tomography. ResultsResults revealed robust effects of stress on global cortical connectivity, with increased global FC in frontoparietal and attentional networks and decreased global FC in the medial default mode network. Moreover, robust increases emerged in FC of the caudate, putamen, and amygdala with regions from the ventral attention/salience network, frontoparietal network, and motor networks. Such regions showed preferential expression of genes involved in cell-to-cell signaling (OPRM1, OPRK1, SST, GABRA3, GABRA5), similar to previous genetic MDD studies. ConclusionsAcute stress altered global cortical connectivity and increased striatal connectivity with cortical regions that express genes that have previously been associated with imaging abnormalities in MDD and are rich in μ and κ opioid receptors. These findings point to overlapping circuitry underlying stress response, reward, and MDD.

Neural Mechanisms Underlying the Impact of Psychological Resilience on Psychosocial Stress Responses

Background: High psychological resilience (HR) could protect individuals from psychosocial stress and thereby make individuals less vulnerable to depression and anxiety; however, the underlying neural mechanism remains to be investigated.Methods: The Montreal Imaging Stress Task (MIST) was administered to participants of 59 healthy individuals with HR and 56 individuals with low psychological resilience (LR) during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning. Cortisol concentrations and subjective stress levels were collected across the MIST. Repeated measures analyses of variance were conducted to measure the group differences in subjective and cortisol stress responses. Two‐sample t‐tests were conducted to detect the group differences in stress‐related brain activation and functional connectivity (FC).Results: The LR group exhibited an increase in cortisol concentration after the MIST, whereas the HR group exhibited a decrease in cortisol concentration after the MIST. The LR group exhibited higher activation in the left anterior insula and lower FC between the left orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and the right temporal pole (TP) (all pFWE &lt; 0.05). Mediation analyses revealed that the left anterior insula mediates the relationship between psychological resilience and depression and the left OFC–right TP FC mediates the relationship between psychological resilience and anxiety.Conclusions: Findings highlight that the anterior insula and OFC–TP FC could be the critical neural mechanism underlying the interaction between psychological resilience and psychosocial stress. Moreover, higher anterior insula activation and lower OFC–TP FC could be the crucial neural mechanism of individuals with low psychological resilience developing into depression/anxiety when experiencing daily psychosocial stressors.

MuLHiTA: A Novel Multiclass Classification Framework With Multibranch LSTM and Hierarchical Temporal Attention for Early Detection of Mental Stress.

Mental stress is an increasingly common psychological issue leading to diseases such as depression, addiction, and heart attack. In this study, an early detection framework based on electroencephalogram (EEG) data is developed for reducing the risk of these diseases. In existing frameworks, signals are often segmented into smaller sections prior to being input to a deep neural network. However, this approach ignores the fundamental nature of EEG signals as a carrier of valuable information (e.g., the integrity of frequency and phase, and temporal fluctuations of EEG components). As such, this type of segmenting may lead to information loss and a failure to effectively identify mental stress levels. Thus, we propose a novel multiclass classification framework termed multibranch LSTM and hierarchical temporal attention (MuLHiTA) for the early identification of mental stress levels. It specifically focuses on not only intraslice (within each slice) but also interslice (between different slices) samples in parallel. This was achieved by including two complementary branches, each of which integrated a specifically designed attention module into a bidirectional long short-term memory (BLSTM) network, enabling extraction of the most discriminative features from interslice and intraslice EEG signals simultaneously. The outputs of attention modules were then summed to obtain a feature representation that contributes to reduce overfitting and more effective multiclass classification. In addition, electrode positions were optimized using neural activity areas under high-stress conditions, thereby reducing computational costs by minimizing the number of critical electrodes. MuLHiTA was evaluated across one private [Montreal imaging stress task (MIST)] and two publicly available EEG datasets [EEG during mental arithmetic tasks (DMAT) and Simultaneous task EEG workload (STEW)]. These were divided into training and test sets using an 8:2 ratio, and the training data were further divided into training and validation sets using a fivefold cross-validation (CV) method, in which the model with the highest accuracy among the five was selected. The model was trained once more with the full training set, and the test data were then used to evaluate its performance. This approach achieved average classification accuracies of 93.58%, 91.80%, and 99.71% for the MIST, STEW, and DMAT datasets, respectively. Experimental results showed MuLHiTA was superior to state-of-the-art algorithms, including EEGNet, BLSTM, EEGLearn, convolutional neural network (CNN)-long short-term memory (LSTM), and convolutional recurrent attention model (CRAM), for multiclass classification. This demonstrates the viability of MuLHiTA for the early detection of mental stress.

The stress-buffering role of friendships in young people with childhood threat experiences: a preliminary report

ABSTRACT Background: High-quality friendships have a positive impact on the mental health of young people with childhood adversity (CA). Social stress buffering, the phenomenon of a social partner attenuating acute stress responses, is a potential yet unexplored mechanism that may underlie this relationship. Objective: This study examined whether perceived friendship quality was related to better mental health and lower neural stress response in young people with CA. Method: A total of N = 102 young people (aged 16–26) with low to moderate CA were included in the study. We first investigated associations between friendship quality, mental health, and CA. In a representative subset (n = 62), we assessed neural stress responses using the Montreal Imaging Stress Task. In our sample, CA was best described along two dimensions resembling threat or deprivation like experiences. Hence, we investigated both cumulative and dimensional effects of CA. Results: We found no support for social thinning after CA, meaning that the severity of CA (cumulative or dimensional) did not differentially impact friendship quality. High-quality friendships, on the other hand, were strongly associated with better mental health. Furthermore, acute stress increased state anxiety and enhanced neural activity in five frontolimbic brain regions, including the left hippocampus. We found weak support that threat experiences interacted with friendship quality to predict left hippocampal reactivity to stress. However, this effect did not survive multiple comparison correction. Conclusion: The absence of social thinning in our sample may suggest that the risk of developing impoverished social networks is low for rather well-functioning young people with low to moderate CA. Regardless, our findings align with prior research, consistently showing a strong association between high-quality friendships and better mental health in young people with CA. Future research is needed to examine whether friendships aid neural stress responses in young people with childhood threat experiences.

COMPARISON OF BRAIN ACTIVATION PATTERNS IN STRESS-INDUCED AND POST-STRESS RESTING STATES: NORMAL SUBJECTS

Stress is a pervasive phenomenon with significant implications for individual well-being. Understanding the neural processes underlying stress responses and recovery is crucial for developing effective interventions. This study employed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the brain activation patterns during stress induction and recovery in healthy adults. The Montreal Imaging Stress Task (MIST) was utilized to elicit acute stress in participants. The results revealed that during the stress task phase, the right hemisphere showed activation in the Inferior Parietal Lobule, Postcentral Gyrus, and Precuneus, while the left hemisphere demonstrated activation in the Inferior Parietal Lobule, Postcentral Gyrus, Middle Frontal Gyrus, and Superior Frontal Gyrus. Following the stress task, during the recovery phase, the right hemisphere exhibited activation in the Precuneus, Middle Occipital Gyrus, Superior Occipital Gyrus, Angular Gyrus, Medial Frontal Gyrus, Middle Frontal Gyrus, and Posterior Cingulate, whereas the left hemisphere displayed activation primarily in the Cuneus. Comparing the two phases, the left frontal lobe and occipital lobe exhibited increased activation during the rest period after stress. In contrast, the parietal lobe showed decreased activation during the recovery phase. These findings contribute to our understanding of the neural mechanisms associated with stress responses and recovery, providing insights into potential interventions for stress management and promoting well-being.

Impact of acute psychosocial stress on attentional control in humans. A study of evoked potentials and pupillary response

Psychosocial stress has increased considerably in our modern lifestyle, affecting global mental health. Deficits in attentional control are cardinal features of stress disorders and pathological anxiety. Studies suggest that changes in the locus coeruleus-norepinephrine system could underlie the effects of stress on top-down attentional control. However, the impact of psychosocial stress on attentional processes and its underlying neural mechanisms are poorly understood. This study aims to investigate the effect of psychosocial stress on attentional processing and brain signatures. Evoked potentials and pupillary activity related to the oddball auditory paradigm were recorded before and after applying the Montreal Imaging Stress Task (MIST). Electrocardiogram (ECG), salivary cortisol, and subjective anxiety/stress levels were measured at different experimental periods. The control group experienced the same physical and cognitive effort but without the psychosocial stress component. The results showed that stressed subjects exhibited decreased P3a and P3b amplitude, pupil phasic response, and correct responses. On the other hand, they displayed an increase in Mismatch Negativity (MMN). N1 amplitude after MIST only decreased in the control group. We found that differences in P3b amplitude between the first and second oddball were significantly correlated with pupillary dilation and salivary cortisol levels. Our results suggest that under social-evaluative threat, basal activity of the coeruleus-norepinephrine system increases, enhancing alertness and decreasing voluntary attentional resources for the cognitive task. These findings contribute to understanding the neurobiological basis of attentional changes in pathologies associated with chronic psychosocial stress.

Role of hippocampus and orbitofrontal cortex in the association of interdependent self-construal with an acute stress response

Empirical evidence indicates that high interdependent self-construal (InterSC) is correlated with exaggerated acute stress responses; however, the underlying neural correlates remain unclear. Considering the regulatory effect of the prefrontal cortex and limbic system on the acute stress response, the primary aim of this study was to investigate the role of the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and hippocampus (HIP) in the relationship between InterSC and acute stress responses. Forty-eight healthy college students underwent a modified version of the Montreal imaging stress task (MIST), while brain activity was recorded using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Participants' saliva samples and subjective stress feelings were collected before, during, and after the MIST. Additionally, participants’ self-construal was measured using questionnaires. Results revealed that InterSC was positively correlated with the activation of OFC, which, in turn, was associated with higher subjective stress feelings. A higher InterSC was also significantly associated with an enhanced salivary cortisol response in those with lower HIP activity. Furthermore, the HIP moderated the indirect effect of InterSC on subjective stress feelings by moderating the effect of InterSC on neural activity in the OFC. This indicated the mediation of the OFC was stronger in those with higher neural activity in the HIP than in those with lower activity in the HIP. In summary, the current study proposed an important role of the OFC-HIP regions in the relationship between InterSC and acute stress responses, making contribution to broadening the field of personality and stress and deepening our understanding of individual differences in acute stress responses.

A Pilot Study: Extraction of a Neural Network and Feature Extraction of Generation and Reduction Mechanisms Due to Acute Stress.

This study aimed to compare the functional connectivity (FC) assessed during acute stress and recovery after stress using the Montreal imaging stress task (MIST) in adults in their 20s and 30s with Korean Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) scores between 15 and 19 points inclusive. Four seed networks, including the salience network, default mode network, frontoparietal network, and dorsal attention network, were specified to extract the results. Healthy male and female adults who were required to make an effort to relieve stress were exposed to acute stress tasks, and the most common FCs were observed in the salience network, default mode network, and frontoparietal network during the stress and recovery phases. Compared to the stress phase, the increased effect size was significantly different in the recovery phase. In the stress phase, characteristically common FCs were observed in the dorsal attention network. During the recovery period, Salience network (Anterior Insula, R) and Salience network (anterior cingulate cortex, ACC)/Salience network (rostral prefrontal cortex, RPFC), Salience network (AInsula) and Salience network (RPFC), and Default Mode network (posterior cingulate) cortex, PCC) and fronto-parietal network (lateral prefrontal cortex, LPFC) FC were characteristically observed.

The effects of left dorsolateral prefrontal transcranial direct current stimulation on episodic future thinking following acute psychosocial stress

ABSTRACT Introduction Research on stress-related disorders and brain imaging suggests that (acute) stress might impact the capacity to mentally simulate specific episodic future events (EFT) through the effects of cortisol on brain regions supporting this cognitive function, such as the prefrontal cortices. This study aims to examine the mechanisms underlying this link, using transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) over the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Methods 60 healthy participants were subjected to the Montreal Imaging Stress Task (MIST), followed by either active or sham tDCS. After stimulation, the EFT task was administered. Salivary cortisol was measured throughout the protocol. Results Higher cortisol AUCi values were linked to less specific episodic future thoughts. Moreover, active tDCS enhanced EFT specificity irrespective of cortisol, especially in high trait ruminators. We did not observe an effect from active tDCS on cortisol AUCi, and equally there was no interaction effect between cortisol AUCi and stimulation condition predictive for EFT specificity. Conclusion Although we did not find evidence for the effects of tDCS on the HPA-system, our data reveal a crucial link between two critical predictors of mental health for the first time, and provide a solution to help rehabilitate EFT deficits. Trial registration: Netherlands National Trial Register identifier: ntr004..

Is daily-life stress reactivity a measure of stress recovery? Aninvestigation of laboratory and daily-life stress.

Typical measures of laboratory reactivity (i.e. difference between control and stress) and recovery (i.e. difference between stress and post-stress) were compared with a conventional measure of daily-life reactivity, best known as event-related stress. Fifty-three healthy individuals between 19 and 35years of age took part in a laboratory session where stress was induced using the repeated Montreal Imaging Stress Task and 8days of experience sampling method. Measures of negative affect, heart rate (HR), HR variability, and skin conductance level were collected. Findings show no strong associations between laboratory and daily life measures with the exception of laboratory affective recovery and daily life reactivity. Findings and their implications are discussed.

Behavioral impulsivity moderates the relationship between acute stress and reward sensitivity

Extant evidence for the relationship between stress and reward sensitivity is inconsistent in direction. The current study aims to offer one explanation for this discrepancy by examining the moderating role of impulsivity. We recruited two groups of participants, who were given a physical stressor (Maastricht Acute Stress Test) and a socio-evaluative stressor (Montreal Imaging Stress Task), respectively (NMAST = 152, NMIST = 192). Combining results from both groups, we found that acute stress blunted reward processing for participants who scored high on behavioral impulsivity in comparison to those who scored low. This moderation effect, however, was not significant for trait impulsivity. Our findings suggest that behavioral measures of impulsivity may be uniquely sensitive to subtle situational factors leading to stress-induced changes in impulsive action.

Vagus activation by Cold Face Test reduces acute psychosocial stress responses

Chronic stress is linked to dysregulations of the two major stress pathways—the sympathetic nervous system and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, which could for example result from maladaptive responses to repeated acute stress. Improving recovery from acute stress could therefore help to prevent this dysregulation. One possibility of physiologically interfering with an acute stress reaction might be provided by applying a cold stimulus to the face (Cold Face Test, CFT) which activates the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), leading to immediate heart rate decreases. Therefore, we investigated the use of the CFT protocol as an intervention to reduce acute stress responses. Twenty-eight healthy participants were exposed to acute psychosocial stress via the Montreal Imaging Stress Task (MIST) in a randomized between-subjects design while heart rate (HR), heart rate variability (HRV), and salivary cortisol were assessed. While both groups were equally stressed during the procedure, participants with CFT intervention showed better recovery, indicated by significant (p<0.05) differences in HR(V). We additionally found a significantly (p<0.05) lower cortisol response to the MIST and less overall cortisol secretion in the CFT condition. Both findings indicate that the CFT can successfully stimulate the PNS and inhibit the HPA axis. To the best of our knowledge, our experiment is the first to successfully use the CFT as a simple and easy-to-apply method to modify biological responses to acute stress.

Sex effects in the interaction of acute stress and pain perception.

A reciprocity between the stress and the pain system is recognized; however, the manner by which sex affects this reciprocity is unclear. Understanding the interactions of stress, pain, and sex may shed light on the apparent women's vulnerability to chronic pain, which often coexists with increased distress, and to affective disorders, which often coexist with chronic pain. The study's aim was to examine the effect of acute, validated, psychosocial stress on pain perception and modulation of women and men in a controlled manner. Participants were 82 women and 66 men. Heat-pain threshold, heat-pain tolerance, and pain modulation by temporal summation of pain (TSP), and pain adaptation were measured before and after exposure to the Montreal Imaging Stress Task (MIST) or to a sham task. The stress response was verified by perceived ratings of stress and anxiety, autonomic variables, and salivary cortisol. A significant stress response was obtained by the MIST among both sexes; however, women displayed a greater increase in perceived distress, and men displayed a greater increase in cortisol. Among women, TSP decreased and pain adaptation increased following the MIST, responses that were predicted by perceived distress levels. Among men, TSP increased following the MIST but was not predicted by the stress variables. In conclusion, acute stress manipulation seems to differentially affect both stress and pain responses of women and men: women exhibited stress-induced antinociception and men exhibited stress-induced pronociception. Higher perceived stress levels among women may trigger a temporary increase in pain inhibition mechanisms to serve evolutionary purposes.

Real-time mental stress detection using multimodality expressions with a deep learning framework.

Mental stress is becoming increasingly widespread and gradually severe in modern society, threatening people’s physical and mental health. To avoid the adverse effects of stress on people, it is imperative to detect stress in time. Many studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of using objective indicators to detect stress. Over the past few years, a growing number of researchers have been trying to use deep learning technology to detect stress. However, these works usually use single-modality for stress detection and rarely combine stress-related information from multimodality. In this paper, a real-time deep learning framework is proposed to fuse ECG, voice, and facial expressions for acute stress detection. The framework extracts the stress-related information of the corresponding input through ResNet50 and I3D with the temporal attention module (TAM), where TAM can highlight the distinguishing temporal representation for facial expressions about stress. The matrix eigenvector-based approach is then used to fuse the multimodality information about stress. To validate the effectiveness of the framework, a well-established psychological experiment, the Montreal imaging stress task (MIST), was applied in this work. We collected multimodality data from 20 participants during MIST. The results demonstrate that the framework can combine stress-related information from multimodality to achieve 85.1% accuracy in distinguishing acute stress. It can serve as a tool for computer-aided stress detection.