Elsevier

Physiology & Behavior

Volume 243, 1 January 2022, 113639
Physiology & Behavior

Chronic stress and executive functioning: A specification-curve analysis

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physbeh.2021.113639Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Common executive functioning (EF) remains preserved under chronic stress.

  • Results do not differ between subjective and objective chronic stress and are mostly independent of analytic choices.

  • Sociodemographic might be a potential moderator between EF and chronic stress.

Abstract

To investigate the association between chronic stress and executive functioning (EF), we assessed 514 young to middle-aged adults in three EF tasks (i.e., Number-Letter, 2-Back, Go/Nogo) that assessed shifting, updating, and inhibition. Chronic stress was assessed by various self-report measures and hair cortisol concentrations as indicators of subjective and objective chronic stress, respectively. In order to test the association between chronic stress and EF, we fit a structural equation model with a latent common EF factor predicted by subjective and objective chronic stress on Kaplan-Meier estimates of response times. Controlling for participants' sex, age household income and the delay between cognitive testing and hair sample collection, neither subjective nor objective chronic stress showed a meaningful association with common EF. Exploratory analyses suggested a moderation effect of income on the association between subjective chronic stress and common EF, with a smaller association for high-income participants. Additionally, we conducted a specification-curve analysis on the association between chronic stress and EF to assess the influence of different analysis choices on results in our dataset. This analysis confirmed the absence of a coherent association between chronic stress and EF by showing that the majority of analytical choices produced null effects and only a small number of analytical choices produced meaningful associations (negative or positive). Taken together, our findings suggest that common EF likely remains preserved under the influence of chronic stress. Our specification-curve analysis, however, also shows that chronic stress may also have either a positive or a negative effect on EF, depending on the choice of covariates and measures of chronic stress and EF. Consequently, more research on the role of these factors for the association between chronic stress and EF is needed to avoid the interpretation of non-replicable stress-EF associations caused by analytical choices or selection bias.

Section snippets

Background

Living in a technologized and globalized world, we are often faced with tasks of complex cognitive nature that require executive functioning (EF), such as cognitive flexibility, monitoring, or goal pursuing. In addition to these cognitive demands, several studies noted an increase of stress-levels in everyday life [26,86], which could lead to a chronification of stress in many cases [26]. More importantly, the high prevalence of chronic stress [11,25,35,86] is not only associated with numerous

Sample

Data collection was part of the initial assessment for the Dresden longitudinal study of chronic stress and cognitive control (StressCog) in November and December 2016. After approval was granted by the local ethics committee (dossiers EK23012016, IRB00001473 and IORG0001076), the recruiting process of the StressCog cohort started. Contact information of 8400 eligible participants between the ages of 25 and 55 years old were provided by the population registry of the City of Dresden. Besides

Measurement model

Descriptive statistics and correlations for the performance measures of the three cognitive tasks are presented in Table 1. Split-half reliabilities (Spearman-Brown corrected) were high, ranging between 0.81 ≤ r ≤ .97. Intercorrelations between the Number-Letter, 2-Back and Go/Nogo task outcomes ranged between 0.01 ≤ r ≤ .32. This is similar to the correlations between EF domains shifting, updating and inhibition reported in ([51]; −0.05 ≤ r ≤ 0.34). Our measurement model showed an excellent

Discussion

The present study aimed to further our understanding of the relationship between chronic stress and EF. For this purpose, we fitted a structural equation model, in which a latent common EF factor was predicted by objective chronic stress (i.e., HCC) and subjective chronic stress (i.e., self-reported chronic stress) on data from a large cross-sectional sample of young and middle-aged adults. Additionally, in order to assess the impact of different analytical choices on such models, we conducted

Research data

All raw data as well as the R script are available under https://osf.io/fzbrw/ [64].

Funding

This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG, Grant No. SFB 940/2 awarded to Sören Enge., Robert Miller & Clemens Kirschbaum).

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors have no competing interests to declare.

Acknowledgement

We thank Clemens Kirschbaum for valuable comments and discussions on an earlier version of this manuscript, as well as Kelly Schaunsland, Christiane Wesarg, Marion Augustin, and Rebekka Reetz for their assistance in the data collection and Florian Rupprecht for his assistance in data preprocessing.

References (89)

  • M.P. Matud

    Gender differences in stress and coping styles

    Pers. Individ. Differ.

    (2004)
  • S.N. McLennan et al.

    Hair cortisol and cognitive performance in working age adults

    Psychoneuroendocrinology

    (2016)
  • A. Miyake et al.

    The unity and diversity of executive functions and their contributions to complex “frontal lobe” tasks: a latent variable analysis

    Cogn. Psychol.

    (2000)
  • M.M. Pulopulos et al.

    Hair cortisol and cognitive performance in healthy older people

    Psychoneuroendocrinology

    (2014)
  • L. Schwabe et al.

    Stress-induced enhancement of response inhibition depends on mineralocorticoid receptor activation

    Psychoneuroendocrinology

    (2013)
  • G.S. Shields et al.

    Does cortisol influence core executive functions? A meta-analysis of acute cortisol administration effects on working memory, inhibition, and set-shifting

    Psychoneuroendocrinology

    (2015)
  • G.S. Shields et al.

    Three-month cumulative exposure to testosterone and cortisol predicts distinct effects on response inhibition and risky decision-making in adolescents

    Psychoneuroendocrinology

    (2019)
  • G.S. Shields et al.

    The effects of acute stress on core executive functions: a meta-analysis and comparison with cortisol

    Neurosci. Biobehav. Rev.

    (2016)
  • T. Stalder et al.

    Analysis of cortisol in hair – State of the art and future directions

    Brain Behav. Immun.

    (2012)
  • T. Stalder et al.

    Stress-related and basic determinants of hair cortisol in humans: a meta-analysis

    Psychoneuroendocrinology

    (2017)
  • N. Tsai et al.

    Stress and executive control: mechanisms, moderators, and malleability

    Brain Cogn.

    (2019)
  • R. Wennig

    Potential problems with the interpretation of hair analysis results

    Forensic Sci. Int.

    (2000)
  • N.T. Aggarwal et al.

    Perceived stress and change in cognitive function among adults 65 years and older

    Psychosom. Med.

    (2014)
  • A.F.T. Arnsten

    Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function

    Nat. Rev. Neurosci.

    (2009)
  • C.K. Bak et al.

    The association between socio-demographic characteristics and perceived stress among residents in a deprived neighbourhood in Denmark

    Eur. J. Public Health

    (2012)
  • T. Bakun Emesh et al.

    Retest reliability of integrated speed–accuracy measures

    Assessment

    (2021)
  • H. Bless et al.

    Need for cognition: Eine Skala zur Erfassung von Engagement und Freude bei Denkaufgaben: need for cognition: a scale measuring engagement and happiness in cognitive tasks

    Z. Sozialpsychologie

    (1994)
  • A. Brand et al.

    Assessing the effects of technical variance on the statistical outcomes of web experiments measuring response times

    Soc. Sci. Comput. Rev.

    (2012)
  • A.E. Castaneda et al.

    Cognitive functioning in relation to burnout symptoms and social and occupational functioning in a population-based sample of young adults

    Nord. J. Psychiatry

    (2011)
  • E. Charmandari et al.

    Endocrinology of the stress response

    Annu. Rev. Physiol.

    (2005)
  • J.D. Cohen

    Cognitive control: core constructs and current considerations

  • S. Cohen et al.

    Who's stressed? Distributions of psychological stress in the United States in probability samples from 1983, 2006, and 2009: psychological stress in the U.S

    J. Appl. Soc. Psychol.

    (2012)
  • S. Cohen et al.

    Perceived stress in a probability sample of the United States

    Soc. Psychol. Health Claremont Symp. Appl. Soc. Psychol.

    (1988)
  • J.R. de Leeuw et al.

    Psychophysics in a Web browser? Comparing response times collected with Javascript and psychophysics toolbox in a visual search task

    Behav. Res. Methods

    (2016)
  • P. Deligkaris et al.

    Job burnout and cognitive functioning: a systematic review

    Work Stress

    (2014)
  • A. Diamond

    Executive functions

    Annu. Rev. Psychol.

    (2013)
  • J.B. Dowd et al.

    Socio-economic status, cortisol and allostatic load: a review of the literature

    Int. J. Epidemiol.

    (2009)
  • F. Elwert et al.

    Endogenous selection bias: the problem of conditioning on a collider variable

    Annu. Rev. Sociol.

    (2014)
  • J.E. Fisk et al.

    Age-related impairment in executive functioning: updating, inhibition, shifting, and access

    J. Clin. Exp. Neuropsychol.

    (2004)
  • N.P. Friedman et al.

    Individual differences in executive functions are almost entirely genetic in origin

    J. Exp. Psychol. Gen.

    (2008)
  • P. Gomez et al.

    A model of the Go/No-Go task

    J. Exp. Psychol. Gen.

    (2007)
  • G. Grossi et al.

    Stress-related exhaustion disorder - clinical manifestation of burnout? A review of assessment methods, sleep impairments, cognitive disturbances, and neuro-biological and physiological changes in clinical burnout

    Scand. J. Psychol.

    (2015)
  • U. Hapke et al.

    Chronischer stress bei Erwachsenen in Deutschland

    Bundesgesundheitsblatt - Gesundheitsforschung - Gesundheitsschutz

    (2013)
  • M.J.A.G. Henckens et al.

    Time-dependent corticosteroid modulation of prefrontal working memory processing

    Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci.

    (2011)
  • 1

    These authors contributed equally to this work.

    View full text