Acute stress impairs cognitive flexibility in men, not women

Abstract

Psychosocial stress influences cognitive abilities, such as long-term memory retrieval. However, less is known about the effects of stress on cognitive flexibility, which is mediated by different neurobiological circuits and could thus be regulated by different neuroendocrine pathways. In this study, we randomly assigned healthy adults to an acute stress induction or control condition and subsequently assessed participants' cognitive flexibility using an open-source version of the Wisconsin Card Sort task. Drawing on work in rodents, we hypothesized that stress would have stronger impairing effects on cognitive flexibility in men than women. As predicted, we found that stress impaired cognitive flexibility in men but did not significantly affect women. Our results thus indicate that stress exerts sex-specific effects on cognitive flexibility in humans and add to the growing body of research highlighting the need to consider sex differences in effects of stress.

Keywords: Cognitive flexibility; Wisconsin card sorting test; men; orbitofrontal cortex; sex differences; stress; women.

Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of Interest This research was supported by a University of California, Davis Psychology Department Summer Grant in Aid of Research to Grant S. Shields, NIH MH103322 to Brian C. Trainor, a University of California, Davis Provost’s Undergraduate Fellowship to Jovian C. W. Lam, and NIH MH059352 and EY025999 to Andrew Yonelinas. These organizations had no role in designing the study; in collecting, analyzing, or interpreting the data; in writing this report; or in deciding to submit this report for publication. The authors declare no conflict of interest with respect to this work.

Figures

Figure 1

Effect of the stress manipulation on cortisol. Values are presented in nmol/L for comparison with other studies, but analyses were conducted using log-transformed cortisol values to correct for skew. As expected, cortisol increased from pre- to post-manipulation in the stress induction group, p<.001, whereas cortisol tended to decrease in the randomly-selected 10 participants in control group we assayed, p=.071. There was no evidence of sex differences in reactivity to the stressor.

Figure 2

Sex-specific effects of acute stress on cognitive flexibility. Men in the stress induction group committed significantly more perseverative errors (log transformed) than men in the control group, p=.044, indicating that stress impaired cognitive flexibility in men. In contrast, women in the stress induction condition did not commit a different number of perseverative errors than women in the control group, p=.543.