Negative self-evaluation induced by acute stress indexed using facial EMGShow others and affiliations
2021 (English)In: Psychoneuroendocrinology, ISSN 0306-4530, E-ISSN 1873-3360, Vol. 133, article id 105402Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]
Maladaptive stress responses are a key feature of several psychiatric disorders, but findings of stress effects on social behavior are inconsistent. Using a within-subject design, we investigated, in 35 healthy participants, the effects of acute stress on psychophysiological and behavioral responses during a simulated online social interaction task. Participants were exposed to established stress and non-stress exposure procedures in two separate sessions. During the task, participants liked or disliked pictures of other putative players and, similarly, saw their own picture being judged by others. After stress exposure, corrugator muscle activity (frowning) was significantly increased when participants saw their own picture while anticipating feedback from others. Consistently, zygomatic muscle activity (smiling) for self-evaluation was lower after stress than in the non-stress session. We found self-report of stress to be a significant predictor of corrugator activity in both sessions, indicating that higher levels of subjective stress overall were accompanied by increased negative self-evaluation. Surprisingly, no stress effects were found on behavioral measures of other-evaluation (i.e., percentage of dislikes to others), but corrugator response significantly predicted the percentage of dislikes during the stress session only. Overall, our findings suggest that stress increases negative self-evaluation as indexed by elevated corrugator activity. Furthermore, stress might sharpen the consistency between corrugator activity and negative evaluation of others. Our results indicate that negative self-evaluation might be a useful therapeutic target in patients with stressrelated psychiatric disorders. In this context, facial muscle activity may be an adequate biomarker for identifying stress-related differences in self-evaluation.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD , 2021. Vol. 133, article id 105402
Keywords [en]
stress; affect; facial expression; negative feedback
National Category
Applied Psychology
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-179827DOI: 10.1016/j.psyneuen.2021.105402ISI: 000697702200017PubMedID: 34530295OAI: oai:DiVA.org:liu-179827DiVA, id: diva2:1600465
Note
Funding Agencies|Swedish Research CouncilSwedish Research CouncilEuropean Commission [2013-07434, 2019-01138]
2021-10-052021-10-052023-12-28