It has been suggested that psychosocial stress influences situational fluctuations of tic frequency. However, evidence from experimental studies is lacking. The current study investigated the effects of the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST-C) on tic frequency in 31 children and adolescents with tic disorders. A relaxation and a concentration situation served as control conditions. Patients were a...

Anxiety is associated with an attentional bias towards angry faces. This effect is most pronounced when the face is presented in the left visual hemifield (LVHF), suggestive of a right hemisphere involvement. Little is known about the modulation of this attentional bias in situations of acute stress. In the current study 38 male participants were randomly allocated to a stress (Trier Social Str...

The neuropeptide S (NPS) and its receptor NPSR represent a transmitter system critically involved in the modulation of anxiety and arousal in rodents. Initial human studies indicate that the T-allele of the functional NPSR gene (NPSR1) polymorphism (rs324981), which increases NPS potency at NPSR, is associated with anxiety-related phenotypes. Since stress is critically involved in the pathogene...

Women are more likely than men to be diagnosed with depression and anxiety-related disorders, and it has been hypothesized that this difference is related to sex differences in stress reactivity. Women typically report higher levels of negative affect than men in response to psychosocial stressors, but the evidence for sex differences in physiological reactivity to stressful situations is not c...

Salivary alpha-amylase activity (sAA) and plasma noradrenaline (NA) concentrations are often considered to be surrogate markers of sympathetic activation in response to stress. However, despite accumulating evidence for a close association between sAA and noradrenaline and other indicators of sympathetic activity, reliability and generality of this relation remains unclear. We employed the Trie...

The current studies investigated whether acute stress potentiates false recollections (so-called "false memories") in a Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm, and whether sex differences modulate these effects. Participants were assigned to either a stress (trier social stress test) or a control group. Subsequently, they were subjected to DRM word lists and probed for recall and recognition. ...

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effects of social stress and stress-induced cortisol on the preconscious selective attention to social threat. Twenty healthy participants were administered a masked emotional Stroop task (comparing color-naming latencies for angry, neutral and happy faces) in conditions of rest and social stress. Stress was induced by means of the Trier s...

Stress is known to influence the hippocampus. Eyeblink conditional discrimination learning is dependent on the hippocampus, but the effects of stress on the task are unknown. Male participants were allocated to a psychosocial stress condition (Trier Social Stress Test) or a control condition. Afterwards, a conditional discrimination task was performed. A tone (the CS) predicted an airpuff (the ...

Interpersonal theories of self-esteem assume that the importance that others place on oneself contributes to individual levels of self-esteem. Recent studies further suggest a possible link between self-esteem and the endocrine stress response, mediated through individual levels of locus of control, without taking levels of social approval into account. The present set of studies aimed to explo...

OBJECTIVE Deficits in empathy, an important part of social cognition, have been described in patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD). Importantly, psychosocial stress enhances emotional empathy in healthy participants. However, it remains unknown whether stress affects empathy in BPD. METHOD We randomized 47 women with BPD and 47 healthy women to either the Trier Social Stress Tes...