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Biological Stress Reactivity and Introspective Sensitivity: An Exploratory Study
Mauricio Barrientos1, Leonel Tapia2, Jaime R Silva1
1Centro de Apego y Regulación Emocional, Facultad de Psicología, Universidad del Desarrollo, Santiago, Chile.
Frontiers in Psychology
|April 16, 2020
Summary
Stress impacts cognitive monitoring. Lower biological stress reactivity correlates with better self-monitoring of attention and response times, suggesting stress broadly impairs introspection.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Psychophysiology
Background:
- Stressful events significantly affect cognitive functions like working memory and attention.
- Introspective sensitivity, the ability to monitor one's own cognitive processes, is crucial for cognitive control.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the relationship between individual stress reactivity and introspective sensitivity.
- To determine if stress response influences the accuracy of self-monitoring cognitive processes.
Main Methods:
- Participants underwent the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) with salivary cortisol measurements to assess stress reactivity.
- Introspective sensitivity was evaluated using a visual search paradigm, assessing confidence in performance, subjective number of scanned items estimation (SNSI), and introspective response time estimation (iRT).
Main Results:
- Individuals with lower cortisol-based stress reactivity showed greater accuracy in estimating SNSI (p=0.033) and iRT (p=0.002).
- Lower stress responders also demonstrated improved accuracy in confidence estimation of their performance (p=0.038).
Conclusions:
- Stress reactivity is linked to the accuracy of introspective monitoring.
- These findings suggest that stress does not selectively impair specific introspective functions but rather broadly alters the introspective mechanism.
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