Personality, Stress, and Intuition: Emotion Regulation Abilities Moderate the Effect of Stress-Dependent Cortisol Increase on Coherence Judgments

Abstract

Objective: 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.

Method: ERA and cortisol responses to social-evaluative stress as induced by a variant of the Trier Social Stress Test were measured in N = 49 participants (32 female, aged 18 to 33 years, M = 22.48, SD = 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.

Results: 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.

Conclusion: 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.

Keywords: coherence judgments; cortisol; emotion regulation abilities; stress regulation; trier social stress test.

FIGURE 1

Hypothesized ERA × cortisol effects on performance, based on the hormetic model by Lupien et al. (2005). MR = mineralocorticoid receptors, GR = glucocorticoid receptors. The four points indicate the hypothesized disordinal interaction between cortisol response and ERA in predicting intuitive cognition.

FIGURE 2

Cortisol concentration at the four time points of measurement. Only for displaying reasons, participants were divided into low medium and high cortisol change groups, based on their AUCi values. TSST = stress induction using the Trier Social Stress Test. RAT = holistic processing task using the Remote Associates Test. Error bars indicate the standard error of the mean.

FIGURE 3

Regression Slopes for the moderating effect of emotion regulation abilities on the relationship between saliva cortisol change (Area under the Curve; AUCi) and the performance in the RAT after negative primes (discrimination index; A’).