Acute Stress Alters Behavioral and Neural Mechanisms of Self-Controlled Decision-Making

Successfully exerting self-control is an important prerequisite for adaptive decision-making in daily life. The experience of acute and chronic stress might, however, negatively affect our ability to align behavior with personally valued long-term goals. In this fMRI study, we examined the effects of experimentally induced acute stress and biomarkers of chronic stress on neural and behavioral substrates of self-controlled decision-making in a large sample (N = 175). We showed that the experience of an acute stressor increased the impact of anticipated short-term action consequences on behavioral decisions. Moreover, acute stress was associated with increased modulation of neural activation in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex by anticipated action short- and long-term consequences. However, acute stress was not associated with participants' overall self-control performance. More work is needed to investigate the boundary conditions of stress effects on self-control and the feasibility of investigating neural mechanisms of self-control in the laboratory.