Guest Editorial
Brains Under Stress
Sonia J Lupien, PhD
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Can J Psychiatry. 2009;54(1):4–5.
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tressisapopulartopicthesedays.Thereisseldomaweek that will pass by without one hearing or reading aboutstress and its deleterious effects on health. In popular terms,stress is defined mainly as time pressure. We feel stressedwhen we do not have thetimetoperformthetaskswe want to performwithinagivenperiodoftime.Thistimepressureusu-ally triggers a set of physiological reactions that give us theindicationthatwearestressed.Althoughthisdefinitioniscer-tainly accurate in terms of one component of the stressresponse, it is important to acknowledge that, in scientificterms, stress is not equivalent to time pressure. If this weretrue, everyone would feel stressed when pressured by time.However, we all know people who are extremely stressed bytime pressure, and others who are actually seeking time pres-sure to perform adequately (so-called procrastinators). Thisshows that stress is a highly individual experience that doesnot depend on a particular event such as time pressure, butrather it depends on specific psychological determinants thattrigger a stress response.Manystudiesnowshowthatthereare4characteristicsofasit-uationthatwilltriggerastressresponseinhumans,definedasthe acute secretion of catecholamines (adrenaline andnoradrenaline) and glucocorticoids, the 2 major stress hor-mones. These characteristics are novelty, unpredictability,threattosurvivalortheego,andalowsenseofcontrol.There-fore, when a situation comprisesone or moreof these charac-teristics, it will induce an increase of stress hormones. Thesestress hormones access the brain through various routes andmodulatememoryso that emotionalevents are better remem- bered than neutral events, ensuring survival of the species.What is important to note in this context is that this complexset of interactions between the environment and the brainmakes it possible to dissociate effects that are related to per-ception of stress, in contrast to perception of emotions.Indeed, although many will consider that a stress is the sameas an emotion, this is not the case. However, emotion andstress share many characteristics. A stressful experience willoften cause a particular emotion (for example, surprise, fear,and joy), and particular emotions can create stressful situa-tions (for example, blushing, owing to extreme timidity, cancause a stressful situation for a person). Moreover, an emo-tion possesses many of the properties of a stressor. First, itoften has an identifiable source. Second, it is usually brief and leads to an intense and conscious experience of shortduration. Finally, an emotion creates bodily reactions (for example,increaseinheartrateandperspiration)thataresimi-lar to those induced by a stressor, and both states act byincreasing arousal. Because of these similarities betweenemotion and stress, most of the literature on emotion, stress,and memory intermixes the effects of emotion and those of stress on memoryfunction. However, emotion and stress are2 different entities. Although a stressful experience willalmost always trigger a specific emotion, a particular emo-tion does not always elicit a stress reaction. As far as labora-torysettingisconcerned,emotionandstressdifferinthewaytheyareinduced, and thus inthewaytheyinfluence memoryin humans. Hence, emotions are usually induced by the pre-sentation of emotional words, films, or pictures, while stressis usually induced by putting a person in a social situationknown to create a stress (for example, a public speakingtask). Because of this important difference between theexperimental paradigms used to measure the effects of emo-tion and stress on memory, different questions have beenasked. Induction of emotion has been used to measure mem-oryforemotionallyarousingevents,whileinductionofstresshasbeenusedtomeasurethespecificeffectsofstressonsub-sequent memory function.Inpreviousyears,mostoftheeffectsofstressandemotiononthe brain and cognitive processing were delineated using psychopharmacologic protocols with administration of exogenous stress hormones or with behavioural designsusingpresentationofhighlyemotionalstimuliorexposuretostressandmeasureofeffectsonmemory.However, inrecentyears, the development of brain imaging technologies hasmade possible the direct visualization of the effects of stressandemotionsonpatternsofbrainactivation.Currently,asuf -ficient number of papers have been published that can allow
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La Revue canadienne de psychiatrie, vol 54, no 1, janvier 20094
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