Preregistration: Modulation of self-control by acute and chronic stress

Abstract

Many decisions we make in our daily lives consist of conflicting choices between immediate gratification and long-term outcomes. Self-control is the ability to regulate one’s behavior in the face of temptations in order to achieve specific goals (Gillebaart, 2018; Goschke, 2014; Roberts et al., 2014). However, such decisions are often made under stressful conditions in our daily lives (Smyth et al., 1998). According to a predominant view, acute uncontrollable stress impairs control functions of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) as a main target of stress-induced activation of both the sympathetic nervous system and the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis (Arnsten, 2009; Shansky & Lipps, 2013; Shields et al., 2016; Tsai et al., 2019). Consistent with this assumption, stress has been shown to have a detrimental impact on cognitive control (Alomari et al., 2015; Bogdanov & Schwabe, 2016; Sänger et al., 2014) and has been associated with a shift from top-down control to stimulus-triggered processing based on subcortical brain regions (Arnsten, 2009), a stronger reliance on habitual responses (Schwabe & Wolf, 2013; Schwabe et al., 2010; Smeets et al., 2019; Wirz et al., 2018), and greater impulsivity as indicated by increased delay discounting (Malesza, 2019) and risky decision-making (Porcelli & Delgado, 2017). Despite results from studies using self-report and clinical studies suggesting that acute stress (particularly in conjunction with high levels of chronic stress) may have adverse effects on self-control (Radenbach et al. 2015), to date surprisingly few experimental studies examined effects of acute stress on outcome anticipation during self-control. In particular, the neural mechanisms which mediate effects of acute stress on self-control remain largely unexplored. A notable exception is a study (Maier et al., 2015), in which participants chose between food items after stress had been induced via the Socially Evaluated Cold Pressor Test (Schwabe et al., 2008). Choices of stressed participants were more strongly influenced by immediately rewarding taste attributes and showed reduced self-control. Behaviorally, higher cortisol levels were associated with faster response times when the immediately rewarding option was selected. At a neural level, stress was accompanied by increased functional connectivity between ventromedial PFC (vmPFC), amygdala, and striatal regions encoding tastiness, indicating a stronger modulation of neural value signals by immediate rewards. Conversely, connectivity between the vmPFC and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) regions mediating self-controlled choices was reduced under stress. These results suggest that stress impairs self-control by increasing the influence of short-term rewards on value signals and attenuating the impact of regions mediating cognitive control and thus reducing the influence of long-term goals on choice behavior. However, as acute stress and the metabolic processes it triggers can alter eating behavior (Adam & Epel, 2007), it remains unclear whether these findings are specific for food items or might also apply to choices between other activities.

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