Elsevier

Psychoneuroendocrinology

Volume 43, May 2014, Pages 95-104
Psychoneuroendocrinology

Is stress affecting our ability to tune into others? Evidence for gender differences in the effects of stress on self-other distinction

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2014.02.006Get rights and content

Summary

Stress is a ubiquitous challenge in society as we consistently interact with others under the influence of stress. Distinguishing self- from other-related mental representations plays an important role for social interactions, and is a prerequisite for crucial social skills such as action understanding, empathy, and mentalizing. Little is known, however, about the effects of stress on self-other distinction. We assessed how acute stress impacts self-other distinction in the perceptual-motor, the affective, and the cognitive domain, in a male and female sample. In all domains, the results show opposing effects of stress on the two genders: while women showed increases in self-other distinction, men showed decreases. Our findings suggest that women flexibly disambiguate self and other under stress, enabling accurate social responses, while men respond with increased egocentricity and less adaptive regulation. This has crucial implications for explaining gender differences in social skills such as empathy and prosociality.

Section snippets

Participants

80 healthy participants (40 females) between 18 and 40 years were included in the study. Screening questionnaires were used to exclude participants who reported acute or chronic psychiatric illness, high social anxiety, taking prescription medication, abuse psychoactive drugs or alcohol, or smoked on a daily basis. Socio-cognitive abilities were determined, using the perspective taking scale and the empathic concern scale from the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI; Davis, 1983), the Emotion

Results

Stress and control group did not differ in age, social anxiety, chronic stress, and any of the trait socio-cognitive abilities measures (all p-values > 0.16). Furthermore, there was no effect of gender on any of these measures (all p-values > 0.14).

Discussion

The present study assessed the effects of acute psychosocial stress on the ability to distinguish self- from other-related representations, across three different levels. We consistently found the same general response pattern: while stressed women showed higher self-other distinction than women in the non-stressful control condition, men showed the converse pattern. More specifically, stressed women showed reduced emotional egocentricity bias, enabling them to judge the emotions of the other

Role of the funding source

This research is funded as part of the FP7 2012 Aeronautics and Air Transport programme under EC contract (ACP2-GA-2012-314765-Man4Gen). The funding source had no further role in study design; in the collection, analysis and interpretation of data; in the writing of the report; and in the decision to submit the paper for publication.

Conflict of interest statement

All authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

Acknowledgments

This research is funded as part of the FP7 2012 Aeronautics and Air Transport programme under EC contract (ACP2-GA-2012-314765-Man4Gen). The views and opinions expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the position and opinions of the Man4Gen consortium and or any of the individual partner organisations. We thank Irene Stepniczka, Anca-Cristina Popa, Alexandra Karden, Blerim Zeqiri, Jan Janesch, Juliane Wasserbauer, Oliver Lukitsch and Stefan Redler for

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