Hormonal contraceptive usage influences stress hormone effects on cognition and emotion.

Men and women partially differ in how they respond to stress and how stress in return affects their cognition and emotion. The influence of hormonal contraceptives (HCs) on this interaction has received little attention, which is surprising given the prevalence of HC usage. This selective review illustrates how HC usage modulates the effects of stress hormones on cognition and emotion. As three examples, we discuss stress hormone effects on episodic memory, fear conditioning and cognitive emotion regulation. The identified studies revealed that stress effects on cognitive-emotional processes in women using HCs were at times reduced or even absent when compared to men or naturally cycling women. Especially striking were the few examples of reversed effects in HC women. As underlying neuroendocrine mechanisms, we discuss influences of HCs on the neuroendocrine stress response and effects of HCs on central glucocorticoid sensitivity. The summarized findings emphasize the need for additional translational research.

Rapid and delayed stress effects on recognition of female and male faces.

Stress and the stress hormone cortisol typically impair memory recognition, especially for emotional words, scenes or objects. However, prior research almost exclusively focused on rapid non-genomic cortisol effects. Additionally, findings for stress hormone effects on face stimuli are contradictory and rare, although very relevant for everyday life. In this preregistered study, we investigated the rapid and delayed stress effects on memory recognition for faces. In a two-day design, 52 healthy men first encoded pictures of male and female faces with distinct emotional expressions. One day later, participants were exposed to a psychophysiological stress (Socially Evaluated Cold-Pressor Test) or a (warm water) control procedure. Memory for the faces was tested at two time points: 25 min after stress onset at the peak of the cortisol increase for stressed participants (rapid non-genomic cortisol effects, which presumably operate within minutes through membrane bound receptors), as well as 90 min after stress onset when cortisol concentrations were back to baseline (delayed genomic cortisol effects, which describe an altered gene transcription resulting in modified neural functions, acting supposedly via intracellular receptors). Rapid stress effects led to enhanced memory recognition for female faces selectively, whereas delayed stress effects led to enhanced memory recognition across male and female faces. Altogether, we observed a beneficial rather than detrimental impact of stress on face recognition with a differential impact on recognition of male and female faces over time. It remains to be determined if this beneficial stress effect relies on the interaction of participants' sex and the sex of facial stimuli. Future research should also more closely look at the underlying mechanisms of how stress exactly influences face recognition, which is for example critically relevant for testimonies.