The STRESS-NL database: A resource for human acute stress studies across the Netherlands.

Stress initiates a cascade of (neuro)biological, physiological, and behavioral changes, allowing us to respond to a challenging environment. The human response to acute stress can be studied in detail in controlled settings, usually in a laboratory environment. To this end, many studies employ acute stress paradigms to probe stress-related outcomes in healthy and patient populations. Though valuable, these studies in themselves often have relatively limited sample sizes. We established a data-sharing and collaborative interdisciplinary initiative, the STRESS-NL database, which combines (neuro)biological, physiological, and behavioral data across many acute stress studies in order to accelerate our understanding of the human acute stress response in health and disease (www.stressdatabase.eu). Researchers in the stress field from 12 Dutch research groups of 6 Dutch universities created a database to achieve an accurate inventory of (neuro)biological, physiological, and behavioral data from laboratory-based human studies that used acute stress tests. Currently, the STRESS-NL database consists of information on 5529 individual participants (2281 females and 3348 males, age range 6-99 years, mean age 27.7 ±â€¯16 years) stemming from 57 experiments described in 42 independent studies. Studies often did not use the same stress paradigm; outcomes were different and measured at different time points. All studies currently included in the database assessed cortisol levels before, during and after experimental stress, but cortisol measurement will not be a strict requirement for future study inclusion. Here, we report on the creation of the STRESS-NL database and infrastructure to illustrate the potential of accumulating and combining existing data to allow meta-analytical, proof-of-principle analyses. The STRESS-NL database creates a framework that enables human stress research to take new avenues in explorative and hypothesis-driven data analyses with high statistical power. Future steps could be to incorporate new studies beyond the borders of the Netherlands; or build similar databases for experimental stress studies in rodents. In our view, there are major scientific benefits in initiating and maintaining such international efforts.

Influence of emotional distraction on working memory performance in borderline personality disorder.

BACKGROUND: Emotion dysregulation, characterized by heightened emotional arousal and increased emotional sensitivity, is a core feature of borderline personality disorder (BPD). Although current theories emphasize the disruptive potential of negative emotions on cognitive functioning in BPD, behavioral and neurobiological data on this relationship are still lacking. METHOD: Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), neural activity was investigated in 22 unmedicated BPD patients and 22 healthy participants (matched for age, education and intelligence) performing an adapted Sternberg working memory task, while being distracted by emotional (negatively arousing) and neutral pictures from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS). RESULTS: Emotional distraction was associated with significantly higher activation in the amygdala and decreased activation in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), extending findings of previous studies in healthy individuals. Patients with BPD showed significantly longer reaction times (RTs) along with significantly higher activation in the amygdala and insula during emotional distraction compared to healthy participants, suggesting that they were more distracted by emotional pictures during the working memory task. Moreover, in the group of BPD patients, a significant negative correlation was found between activation in limbic brain regions and self-reports of current dissociative states. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings suggest hyper-responsiveness to emotionally distracting pictures in BPD patients that negatively affects working memory performance. This stresses the importance of emotion dysregulation in the context of cognitive functioning. Moreover, our findings suggest that dissociative states have a dampening effect on neural reactivity during emotional challenge in BPD.

Psychosocial stress impairs working memory at high loads: an association with cortisol levels and memory retrieval.

Stress and cortisol are known to impair memory retrieval of well-consolidated declarative material. The effects of cortisol on memory retrieval may in particular be due to glucocorticoid (GC) receptors in the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex (PFC). Therefore, effects of stress and cortisol should be observable on both hippocampal-dependent declarative memory retrieval and PFC-dependent working memory (WM). In the present study, it was tested whether psychosocial stress would impair both WM and memory retrieval in 20 young healthy men. In addition, the association between cortisol levels and cognitive performance was assessed. It was found that stress impaired WM at high loads, but not at low loads in a Sternberg paradigm. High cortisol levels at the time of testing were associated with slow WM performance at high loads, and with impaired recall of moderately emotional, but not of highly emotional paragraphs. Furthermore, performance at high WM loads was associated with memory retrieval. These data extend previous results of pharmacological studies in finding WM impairments after acute stress at high workloads and cortisol-related retrieval impairments.