title: Acute stress influences neural circuits of reward processing.
abstract: People often make decisions under aversive conditions such as acute stress. Yet, less is known about the process in which acute stress can influence decision-making. A growing body of research has established that reward-related information associated with the outcomes of decisions exerts a powerful influence over the choices people make and that an extensive network of brain regions, prominently featuring the striatum, is involved in the processing of this reward-related information. Thus, an important step in research on the nature of acute stress' influence over decision-making is to examine how it may modulate responses to rewards and punishments within reward processing neural circuitry. In the current experiment, we employed a simple reward processing paradigm - where participants received monetary rewards and punishments - known to evoke robust striatal responses. Immediately prior to performing each of two task runs, participants were exposed to acute stress (i.e., cold pressor) or a no stress control procedure in a between-subjects fashion. No stress group participants exhibited a pattern of activity within the dorsal striatum and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) consistent with past research on outcome processing - specifically, differential responses for monetary rewards over punishments. In contrast, acute stress group participants' dorsal striatum and OFC demonstrated decreased sensitivity to monetary outcomes and a lack of differential activity. These findings provide insight into how neural circuits may process rewards and punishments associated with simple decisions under acutely stressful conditions.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Marquette University Milwaukee, WI, USA.
authors.forename: Anthony J
authors.initials: AJ
authors.lastname: Porcelli
authors.forename: Andrea H
authors.initials: AH
authors.lastname: Lewis
authors.forename: Mauricio R
authors.initials: MR
authors.lastname: Delgado
keywords: acute stress; cold pressor; cortisol; dorsal striatum; fMRI; orbitofrontal cortex; reward processing