Journal
FRONTIERS IN NEUROSCIENCE
Volume 6, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
FRONTIERS MEDIA SA
DOI: 10.3389/fnins.2012.00157
Keywords
acute stress; cold pressor; reward processing; dorsal striatum; orbitofrontal cortex; fMRI; cortisol
Categories
Funding
- National Institute on Drug Abuse [R01DA027764]
- NATIONAL INSTITUTE ON DRUG ABUSE [R01DA027764] Funding Source: NIH RePORTER
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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.
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