Radtke Elise L, Düsing Rainer, Kuhl Julius, Tops Mattie, Quirin Markus
Department of Psychology, Osnabrück University, Osnabrück, Germany.
Developmental and Educational Psychology Unit, Leiden University, Leiden, Netherlands.
Front Psychol. 2020 Feb 27;11:339. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00339. eCollection 2020.
Findings on the relationship between hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) activity and cognitive performance are inconsistent. We investigated whether personality in terms of emotion regulation abilities (ERA) moderates the relationship between stress-contingent HPA activity and accuracy of intuitive coherence judgments.
ERA and cortisol responses to social-evaluative stress as induced by a variant of the Trier Social Stress Test were measured in = 49 participants (32 female, aged 18 to 33 years, = 22.48, = 3.33). Subsequently, in a Remote Associates Task they provided intuitive judgments on whether word triples, primed by either stress-reminding or neutral words, are coherent or not.
Under relative cortisol increase participants low in ERA showed reduced performance whereas individuals high in ERA showed increased performance. By contrast, under conditions of low cortisol change, individuals low in ERA outperformed those high in ERA.
Personality can moderate the link between stress and cognition such as accurate intuition. This can happen to a degree that existing effects may not be become apparent in the main effect (i.e. without considering personality), which highlights the necessity to consider personality in stress research, ERA in particular. We discuss the findings with respect to individual differences in neurobehavioral mechanisms potentially underlying ERA and corresponding interactions with cognitive processing.
下丘脑 - 垂体 - 肾上腺皮质（HPA）活动与认知表现之间关系的研究结果并不一致。我们调查了情绪调节能力（ERA）方面的人格特质是否会调节应激相关的HPA活动与直觉连贯性判断准确性之间的关系。
对49名参与者（32名女性，年龄18至33岁，平均年龄22.48岁，标准差3.33）测量了ERA以及由改良版特里尔社会应激测试诱导的对社会评价性应激的皮质醇反应。随后，在一个远距离联想任务中，他们对由应激提示词或中性词引发的单词三元组是否连贯做出直觉判断。
在皮质醇相对增加的情况下，ERA低的参与者表现下降，而ERA高的个体表现上升。相比之下，在皮质醇变化较小的情况下，ERA低的个体表现优于ERA高的个体。
人格特质可以调节应激与诸如准确直觉等认知之间的联系。这种调节程度可能使得在主效应（即不考虑人格特质）中现有效应不明显，这突出了在应激研究中考虑人格特质，尤其是ERA的必要性。我们从潜在的ERA神经行为机制个体差异以及与认知加工相应相互作用方面讨论了研究结果。
