Acute stress reduces the emotional attentional blink: Evidence from human electrophysiology
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Acute stress reduces the emotional attentional blink: Evidence from human electrophysiology Yuecui Kan 1 & Xuewei Wang 2 & Xitong Chen 2 & Hanxuan Zhao 2 & Jijun Lan 1 & Haijun Duan 2 Accepted: 25 October 2020 # The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2020
Abstract The present study is the first to examine the time-dependent mechanism of acute stress on emotional attentional blink (EAB) with event-related potential (ERP) measures. We explored the stage characteristics of stress affecting EAB, whether it affects the early selective attention process (marked by early posterior negativity) or the late working memory consolidation (marked by late positive potential). Sixty-one healthy participants were exposed to either a Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) or a control condition, and salivary cortisol was measured to reflect the stress effect. ERPs were recorded during an attentional blink (AB) paradigm in which target one (T1) were negative or neutral images. Results showed stress generally reduced AB effects. Specifically, stress promoted the early selective attention process of target two (T2) following a neutral T1 but did not affect T2 consolidation into working memory. Correlational analyses further confirmed the positive effect of cortisol and negative emotional state on AB performance. Moreover, the ERP results of acute stress on AB conformed to the trade-off effect between T1 and T2; that is, stress reduced T1 late working memory consolidation and improved T2 early selective attention process. These findings further demonstrated that stress did not change the central resource limitation of AB. In general, stress generates a dissociable effect on AB early- and late-stage processing; namely, acute stress reduce the AB effect mainly from the improvement of participants’ overall ability to select the targets in the early stage. Keywords Acute stress . Emotional attentional blink . Cortisol . Event-related potential
Introduction Stress is a nonspecific systemic response that could activate autonomic nerves system and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis (Allen, Kennedy, Cryan, Dinan, Clarke, 2014). Hormones (mainly cortisol) released in response to stress can cross the blood-brain barrier and widely act on various human brain regions that are rich in stress hormone receptors (such as the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala), thereby
* Jijun Lan [email protected] * Haijun Duan [email protected] 1
School of Psychology, Yanta Campus, Shaanxi Normal University, 199 South Chang’an Road, Xi’an 710062, People’s Republic of China
2
Key Laboratory of Modern Teaching Technology, Ministry of Education, Shaanxi Normal University Centre for Teacher Professional Ability Development, Yanta Campus, 199 South Chang’an Road, Xi’an 710062, People’s Republic of China
affecting selective attention, emotional processing, and various advanced cognitive functions (Berke, Reidy, Gentile, & Zeichner, 2019; Herzog, D’Andrea, DePierro, & Khedari, 2018; Szőllősi, Pajkossy, Demeter, Kéri, & Racsmány, 2018). Directing their attention to certain as
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