The effects of stress and stress hormones on human cognition: Implications for the field of brain and cognition
Introduction
Stress is a popular topic these days. A week seldom passes without hearing or reading about stress and its deleterious effects on health. Given this negative impact of stress on human health, many types of stress management therapies have been put forward to decrease stress and thus, promote health. However, there is a great paradox in the field of stress research, and it relates to the fact that the popular definition of stress is very different from the scientific definition of stress. This has left a multitude of people and experts talking about, and working on, very different aspects of the stress response.
In popular terms, stress is mainly defined as time pressure. We feel stressed when we do not have the time to perform the tasks we want to perform within a given period of time. This time pressure usually triggers a set of physiological reactions that give us the indication that we are stressed. Although this definition is certainly accurate in terms of one component of the stress response, it is important to acknowledge that in scientific terms, stress is not equivalent to time pressure. If this were true, every individual would feel stressed when pressured by time. However, we all know people that seek time pressure in order to perform adequately and others that are extremely stressed by time pressure. This shows that stress is a highly individual experience that does not depend on a particular event such as time pressure, but rather, it depends on specific psychological determinants that trigger a stress response.
Section snippets
What is stress?
Prior to becoming part of our day-to-day conversations, the term “stress” was used by engineers to explain forces that can put strain on a structure. For example, one could place strain on a piece of metal in such a way that it would break like glass when it reached its stress level. In 1936, Hans Selye (reproduced in Selye, 1998) borrowed the term of ‘stress’ from the field of engineering and talked about stress as being a non-specific phenomenon representing the intersection of symptoms
Effects of exogenous glucocorticoids on cognition
In an attempt to present the reader with a clear and complete view of the effects of glucocorticoids on human cognition, our background will be historical, as we will present the various models of glucocorticoid-effects on human cognition as a function of new approaches and models that have been described from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. We use this approach for two main reasons. First, history will teach us that our view of glucocorticoid effects on human cognition remained
Stress, emotion, and cognition
Now that we have described the exogenous effects of glucocorticoids on cognition, it is important to turn our attention to the fact that endogenously released glucocorticoids in the face of stress can also impact cognitive performance. Indeed, most of the previous literature covered used exogenous administrations of synthetic glucocorticoids in order to delineate the effects of glucocorticoids on human cognitive function. Yet, and as presented in Fig. 1, glucocorticoids are natural substances
Stress, memory, and the testing environment
In previous sections, we have summarized the studies showing that both exogenous and endogenous increases in stress hormones can impact on cognitive function. We have also shown that the memory-enhancing effects of emotions are mainly sustained by the catecholaminergic system, while the memory-impairing effects of stress on neutral memory are sustained by the glucocorticoid system. Now, can these studies showing impairing effects of stress on neutral memory have any implications for the field
Conclusions
In this paper, we have reviewed the literature on the effects of stress and stress hormones on human cognitive function with a special emphasis on glucocorticoids given their capacity to cross the blood–brain barrier and access the brain where they can influence learning and memory through binding to specific receptors.
We have first provided a historical background of the effects of glucocorticoids on cognitive function with a particular emphasis on steroid psychosis. Our goal here was to
Acknowledgments
The studies of Lupien et al., reported in this paper have been funded by grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, grants from the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to S.J.L. S.J.L. is funded by an Investigator Award from the Canadian Institute of Aging of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
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