Risky Decision Making Under Stressful Conditions: Men and Women With Smaller Cortisol Elevations Make Riskier Social and Economic Decisions.

Men often make riskier decisions than women across a wide range of real-life behaviors. Whether this sex difference is accentuated, diminished, or stable under stressful conditions is, however, contested in the scientific literature. A critical blind spot lies amid this contestation: Most studies use standardized, laboratory-based, cognitive measures of decision making rather than complex real-life social simulation tasks to assess risk-related behavior. To address this blind spot, we investigated the effects of acute psychosocial stress on risk decision making in men and women (N = 80) using a standardized cognitive measure (the Iowa Gambling Task; IGT) and a novel task that simulated a real-life social situation (an online chatroom in which participants interacted with other men and women in sexually suggestive scenarios). Participants were exposed to either an acute psychosocial stressor or an equivalent control condition. Stressor-exposed participants were further characterized as high- or low-cortisol responders. Results confirmed that the experimental manipulation was effective. On the IGT, participants characterized as low-cortisol responders (as well as those in the Non-Stress group) made significantly riskier decisions than those characterized as high-cortisol responders. Similarly, in the online chatroom, participants characterized as low-cortisol responders (but not those characterized as high-cortisol responders) were, relative to those in the Non-Stress group, significantly more likely to make risky decisions. Together, these results suggest that at lower levels of cortisol both men and women tend to make riskier decisions in both economic and social spheres.

Elevated Cortisol Leaves Working Memory Unaffected in Both Men and Women.

Activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis (as might occur, for example, when the organism encounters a threat to allostatic balance) leads to the release of cortisol into the bloodstream and, ultimately, to altered neural functioning in particular brain regions (e.g., the prefrontal cortex (PFC)). Although previous studies suggest that exposure to acute psychosocial stress (and hence, presumably, elevation of circulating cortisol levels) enhances male performance on PFC-based working memory (WM) tasks, few studies have adequately investigated female performance on WM tasks under conditions of elevated cortisol. Hence, we compared associations between elevated (relative to baseline) levels of circulating cortisol and n-back performance in a South African sample (38 women in the late luteal phase of their menstrual cycle, 38 men). On Day 1, participants completed practice n-back tasks. On Day 2, some completed the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST), whereas others experienced a relaxation period, before completing 1-back and 3-back tasks. We measured self-reported anxiety and salivary cortisol at baseline, post-manipulation and end of session. We reconstituted group assignment so that all women with elevated cortisol were in one group (EC-Women; n = 17), all men with elevated cortisol were in another (EC-Men; n = 19), all women without elevated cortisol were in a third (NoEC-Women; n = 21), and all men without elevated cortisol were in a fourth (NoEC-Men; n = 19) group. Analyses suggested this reconstitution was effective: in EC, but not NoEC, groups cortisol levels rose significantly from baseline to post-manipulation. Analyses of n-back data detected significant relations to task load (i.e., better performance on 1-back than on 3-back tasks), but no significant relations to sex, performance accuracy/speed, or cortisol variation. The data patterns are inconsistent with reports describing sex differences in effects of stress on WM performance. We speculate that cross-study methodological differences account for these inconsistencies, and, particularly, that between-study variation in the magnitude of baseline cortisol levels might affect outcomes. For instance, diurnal cortisol rhythms of South African samples might have flatter curves, and lower baseline values, than predominantly Caucasian samples from the United States and western Europe due to greater prenatal and lifetime stress, more socioeconomic disadvantage and faster ancestral life history (LH) strategies. We describe ways to disconfirm this hypothesis, and urge further cross-national research exploring these possibilities.

The fear-factor stress test: an ethical, non-invasive laboratory method that produces consistent and sustained cortisol responding in men and women.

We describe a method to administer a controlled, effective stressor to humans in the laboratory. The method combines the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) and the Cold Pressor Test into a single, believable procedure called the Fear-Factor Stress Test (FFST). In the procedure, participants imagine auditioning for the reality television show Fear Factor. They stand before a video recorder and a panel of judges while (a) delivering a motivational speech, (b) performing a verbal arithmetic task, and (c) placing one hand into a bucket of ice water for up to 2 min. We measured subjective anxiety, heart rate, and salivary cortisol in three groups of young adults (n = 30 each, equal numbers of men and women): FFST, TSST, and Control (a placebo version of the FFST). Although the FFST and TSST groups were not distinguishable at the cortisol measure taken 5 min post-manipulation, at 35 min postmanipulation average cortisol levels in the TSST group had returned to baseline, whereas those in the FFST group continued to rise. The proportion of individual cortisol responders (≥ 2 nmol/l increase over baseline) in the TSST and FFST groups did not differ at the 5-min measure, but at the 35-min measure the FFST group contained significantly more responders. The findings indicate that the FFST induces a more robust and sustained cortisol response (which we assume is a marker of an HPA-axis response) than the TSST, and that it does so without increasing participant discomfort or incurring appreciably greater resource and time costs.