Cognitive and Neural Mechanisms of Stress Cognition: Becoming immersed in stress and disengaging from it with mindful attention Público
Lebois, Lauren Ann McDonough (2014)
Published
Abstract
Because chronic stress is linked to decreased well-being, establishing the processes that both produce and disable stress is important. We focus on how people attribute stressfulness to events, the subjective realism of stressful cognition, and one means of blocking subjective realism, mindful attention. In article 1, we present a Grounded Theory of Stress Cognition, explaining how people attribute stressfulness to events. According to this theory, when people experience stress, they store situated conceptualizations in memory that typically include features related to expectancy violation, threat, efficacy, peripheral physiology, emotion, rumination, coping, and metacognition. Later, new events are categorized as stressful when they are similar to situated conceptualizations established for prior stressful events. To assess this theory, participants evaluated features of stressful and non-stressful situations. In a multilevel regression model, situational features explained 85% of the variance in perceived stressfulness, supporting our hypothesis that people use situated conceptualizations of previous experiences to categorize current stressful events. When an event is perceived as stressful, it often seems real, as if they were happening in the moment. One possibility is that this subjective realism results from simulating the self engaged in a situation (immersion). If so, then disengaging the self--decentering--should reduce the subjective realism associated with immersion, and therefore stressfulness. In a brief intervention outlined in article 2, we taught participants a strategy for disengaging from events, simply viewing their thoughts as fleeting mental states (mindful attention). Neural activity was measured as participants subsequently imagined stressful and non-stressful events during mindful attention vs. immersion. Mindful attention showed greater activity in brain areas associated with perspective shifting and effortful attention, whereas immersion showed greater activity in areas associated with self-processing and visceral states. These results suggest that, through shifts of perspective, mindful attention produces decentering by rapidly disengaging embodied senses of self from stressful situations so that affect doesn't develop. Together findings from both articles provide a more nuanced understanding of mechanisms that contribute to reenacting stressful events, how participants categorize events as stressful, why stressful thoughts feel so real, and why mindfulness has a therapeutic effect.
Table of Contents
General Introduction ........................................................................................................................................1
Preface: Addressing Unresolved
Issues................................................................................................................2
Stress: Overview Cognitive, Neural, and Physiological
Mechanisms...........................................................................4
Overview of grounded cognition and Conceptual Act Theory
....................................................................................5
Neural correlates of stressful cognition ................................................................................................................6
Hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis regulation ......................................................................................................7
HPA axis .........................................................................................................................................................9
Subjective realism of stressful thoughts ..............................................................................................................12
Blocking the Subjective Realism of Thoughts ........................................................................................................12
Brief Mindfulness
Interventions ..........................................................................................................................15
Mindful attention .............................................................................................................................................17
Overview........................................................................................................................................................18
Article format .................................................................................................................................................20
Article 1: A Grounded Theory of Stress Cognition ..................................................................................................21
Abstract ........................................................................................................................................................22
Introduction ...................................................................................................................................................23
Building on Appraisal Theories ...........................................................................................................................24
Grounded Cognition .........................................................................................................................................25
Situated conceptualization .................................................................................................................................26
Pattern completion inferences ............................................................................................................................27
Simulation ......................................................................................................................................................29
A Grounded Theory of Stress Cognition ................................................................................................................30
Stress cognition results from general cognitive mechanisms ....................................................................................32
Characterizing the general
category of stressful experiences and its associated
features ..............................................33
Study Overview ...............................................................................................................................................37
Methods .........................................................................................................................................................39
Participants ....................................................................................................................................................39
Study Design ..................................................................................................................................................39
Materials .......................................................................................................................................................40
Life Events .....................................................................................................................................................40
Procedure ......................................................................................................................................................41
Statistical Method ............................................................................................................................................42
Results ..........................................................................................................................................................44
Correlation Analysis .........................................................................................................................................44
Data Reduction through Factor Analysis ...............................................................................................................48
Predicting Perceived Stressfulness with Multilevel Regression Models .......................................................................49
Model 1 .........................................................................................................................................................49
Model 2 .........................................................................................................................................................50
Model 3 .........................................................................................................................................................50
Further analysis of the Core Features factor .........................................................................................................51
Further analysis of individual differences .............................................................................................................52
Discussion ......................................................................................................................................................53
Why is the Perception of Stress Important? ..........................................................................................................56
Stress Cognition Originates in General Cognitive Mechanisms
..................................................................................57
Relations Between Stress Cognition, Neural Activity, and Peripheral
Physiology ..........................................................59
Further Exploring Individual Differences in Cognition
..............................................................................................59
Conclusion ......................................................................................................................................................61
References .....................................................................................................................................................62
Author Contributions .........................................................................................................................................73
Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................................................73
Declaration of Conflicting Interests .....................................................................................................................73
Funding .........................................................................................................................................................73
Footnotes .......................................................................................................................................................74
Tables ...........................................................................................................................................................75
Table 1 ..........................................................................................................................................................75
Table 2 ..........................................................................................................................................................78
Table 3 ..........................................................................................................................................................79
Figures ..........................................................................................................................................................80
Figure 1 .........................................................................................................................................................80
Supplemental Materials
.....................................................................................................................................81
Article 2: Decentering the self during mindful attention to imagined stressful events ..................................................120
Abstract ........................................................................................................................................................121
Introduction ...................................................................................................................................................122
Subjective Realism ..........................................................................................................................................122
Mindfulness ....................................................................................................................................................122
Extended practice vs. brief interventions .............................................................................................................123
Experiment Overview ......................................................................................................................................125
Method .........................................................................................................................................................125
Design and Participants ...................................................................................................................................125
Design .........................................................................................................................................................126
Participants ...................................................................................................................................................127
Materials ......................................................................................................................................................127
Scenarios .....................................................................................................................................................127
Procedure .....................................................................................................................................................129
Training Session 1 ..........................................................................................................................................129
Training Session 2 ..........................................................................................................................................132
Scanning Session
...........................................................................................................................................132
Post scan session ...........................................................................................................................................133
Scan Sequence ..............................................................................................................................................133
Image Preprocessing and Statistical Analyses ......................................................................................................134
Conjunction analyses .......................................................................................................................................135
Contrast analyses ...........................................................................................................................................136
Results .........................................................................................................................................................136
Behavior Results ............................................................................................................................................136
Shared Activations in the Conjunction Analyses ....................................................................................................137
Reading Period ...............................................................................................................................................137
Strategy Period ..............................................................................................................................................138
Unique Activations in the Conjunction Analyses ....................................................................................................139
Stressful Events .............................................................................................................................................139
Nonstressful Events ........................................................................................................................................140
Network Analysis of the Unique Activations ........................................................................................................141
Stressful Events .............................................................................................................................................141
Nonstressful Events ........................................................................................................................................142
Critical comparisons between conditions ............................................................................................................143
Linear Contrast Analyses .................................................................................................................................144
Reading Period ..............................................................................................................................................144
Strategy Period .............................................................................................................................................146
Discussion ....................................................................................................................................................147
Relations to Previous Neuroimaging Findings ......................................................................................................148
Implications for Extended Practice and Intervention .............................................................................................150
References ...................................................................................................................................................152
Author Contributions ......................................................................................................................................163
Acknowledgments ..........................................................................................................................................163
Declaration of Conflicting Interests ...................................................................................................................163
Funding ........................................................................................................................................................164
Tables .........................................................................................................................................................165
Table 1 .........................................................................................................................................................165
Table 2 .........................................................................................................................................................172
Table 3 .........................................................................................................................................................179
Figures .........................................................................................................................................................180
Figure 1 ........................................................................................................................................................180
Figure 2 ........................................................................................................................................................181
Figure 3 ........................................................................................................................................................182
Figure 4 ........................................................................................................................................................183
Figure 5 ........................................................................................................................................................184
Supplemental Materials ...................................................................................................................................186
General Discussion .........................................................................................................................................207
Clarification of Additional
Results ......................................................................................................................208
Integrating Results Across Articles.....................................................................................................................210
Self and Stress ..............................................................................................................................................212
Social Self-Preservation Theory ........................................................................................................................212
Limitations ....................................................................................................................................................213
Future Directions and Conclusions .....................................................................................................................215
References.....................................................................................................................................................219
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