| 其他摘要 | We live in a time of stress. Stress has been shown to be an important risk factor for a variety of physical and mental disorders. However, even when confronted with an identical stressor, humans’ responses are substantially different from each other. These differential stress responses further contribute to the differences in stress susceptibility and coping abilities. Therefore, identifying predictors of individual differences in stress responses is of great importance for screening of stress- susceptible populations and selection of personnel for high-pressure positions.
Stress breaks the dynamic balance of the organism, which requires the individual to adjust self to restore homeostasis. Therefore, self-regulation is a key factor contributing to the difference in stress response. Self-regulation includes two aspects: cognitive control and emotional regulation. Although the predictive effects of cognitive control and emotion regulation on stress response have been preliminarily studied, there still exist problems such as measuring the predictors in a single and subjective way, considering only the rising phase of physiological response in stress response, as well as ignoring the recovery phase and behavioral performance. Therefore, this work intends to use three studies to explore the predictive effects of objective indicators of cognitive control and emotion regulation, especially neural activity indicators, on stress responses and to further explore the intervention effects of self-regulation.
Study 1 aimed to investigate the predictive role of cognitive control and emotion regulation on physiological responses to acute stress and behavioral performance. We used a conflict task and a picture viewing task to measure individuals’ cognitive control and emotional regulation, respectively, while electroencephalogram was recorded. Then we used the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) to induce acute stress in individuals and monitored their physiological responses and behavioral performance during the stressful state. The results of Study 1 did not detect a predictive effect of cognitive control on acute stress, but found that the late positive potential (LPP), a neural activity indicator of emotion regulation, was effective in predicting cortisol responses to acute stress, as evidenced by the fact that the decrease in LPP by cognitive reappraisal predicted weaker cortisol responses to acute stress, whereas the decrease in LPP by expression suppression predicted stronger cortisol responses to acute stress.
Study 2 aimed to investigate the predictive role of cognitive control and emotion regulation on daily stress responses. We used an empirical sampling method to track individuals’ daily stressful events and corresponding perceived stress and affect for two consecutive weeks. The results of Study 2 did not detect a predictive effect of emotion regulation on daily stress, but found that the behavioral indicator in the cognitive control task predicted negative affect in response to daily stress, as indicated by the greater the adaptation effect in reaction time (RT), the stronger the individual’s negative affect in response to the daily stress; Moreover, the neural indicators of cognitive control predicted the recovery from stress, as shown by the greater the individual’s adaptation effect in N2 and P3, the less the impact of the previous day's stress level on the next day's stress level, i.e., the greater the stress adaptation ability. In addition, neural indicators of cognitive control predicted the trajectories of daily stress responses.
Study 3 further explored the interventional effects of emotion regulation on stress responses. We used the same method (TSST) to induce stress and then examined the effects of emotion regulation on the physiological responses to and cognitive functions under acute stress. The results of Study 3 validated the modulatory effects of emotion regulation on the cortisol response and long-term memory under stress.
In summary, the present study found that emotion regulation predicted cortisol reaction and recovery processes to acute stress, whereas cognitive control predicted negative affect in response to daily stress and the dynamic development of daily stress. Furthermore, the brief emotion regulation intervention was able to influence cortisol responses and memory under acute stress. The above findings reveal the differential predictive effects of cognitive control and emotion regulation on stress responses, deepen our understanding of the relationship between brain neural circuits and stress responses, and preliminarily validate the interventional effects of emotion regulation on stress responses, with both theoretical significance and practical implications. |
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