Elsevier

Psychoneuroendocrinology

Volume 78, April 2017, Pages 48-56
Psychoneuroendocrinology

The burden of conscientiousness? Examining brain activation and cortisol response during social evaluative stress

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2017.01.019Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Conscientiousness modulates cortisol response to a social stress task.

  • It is positively correlated with brain responses in amygdala and insula in males.

  • And mediates the influence of amygdala and insula activation on cortisol output.

Abstract

Although conscientiousness has for a long time been considered generally adaptive, there are findings challenging this view, suggesting that conscientiousness might be less advantageous during uncontrollable stress. We here examined the impact of conscientiousness on brain activation during and the cortisol response following an uncontrollable social evaluative stress task in order to test this hypothesis.

Brain activation and cortisol levels were measured during an fMRI stress task, where subjects (n = 86) performed cognitive tasks containing preprogrammed failure under time pressure, while being monitored by a panel of experts inducing social-evaluative threat. The degree of conscientiousness was measured using the NEO-FFI.

We observed a positive correlation between conscientiousness and salivary cortisol levels in response to the stressful task in male subjects only. In male subjects conscientiousness correlated positively with activation in right amygdala and left insula, and, moreover, mediated the influence of amygdala and insula activation on cortisol output. This pattern of brain activation can be interpreted as a disadvantageous response to uncontrollable stress to which highly conscientious individuals might be predisposed.

This is the first study showing the effect of conscientiousness on physiology and brain activation to an uncontrollable psychosocial stressor. Our results provide neurobiological evidence for the hypothesis that conscientiousness should not just be seen as beneficial, but rather as a trait associated with either costs or benefits depending on the extent to which one is in control of the situation.

Introduction

Conscientiousness (C) traditionally has been seen as a protective factor, providing longevity (Kern and Friedman, 2008) and subjective well-being (Steel et al., 2008), and moderating the relationship between daily hassles and health-behavior (O’Connor et al., 2009). However, others challenge the generally protective effect of conscientiousness, suggesting that conscientiousness is rather associated with either costs or benefits, depending on the situation (Nettle, 2006).

One indication that conscientiousness is not always advantageous for well-being is provided by a study showing that highly conscientious individuals experience a 120% higher decrease in life satisfaction than those at low levels when being 3 years unemployed (Boyce et al., 2010). In the context of unemployment, often perceived as severe and chronic failure, conscientiousness thus seems to be a trait that might in some circumstances constitute a risk for well-being (Boyce et al., 2010).

Additionally, it has been reported that highly conscientious individuals experience higher tension after receiving negative feedback than less conscientious individuals (Cianci et al., 2010). Similar to unemployment, negative feedback can be interpreted as failure that cannot easily be changed or controlled. It appears plausible that highly conscientious individuals become more strongly affected by experiences of failure, because of being high-achievers who are not self-indulgent (McCrae and John, 1992).

Beyond that conscientiousness is not only associated with achievement-striving but also with high levels of self-regulation, persistence, impulse-control, and self-discipline (McCrae and John, 1992). Highly conscientious individuals are thus likely to be motivated to succeed and to persist until a particular goal is attained. This might result in being rigidly attached to previously defined goals (Nettle, 2006), which in turn might induce increased stress levels in the context of uncontrollable failure. In other words, as conscientiousness seems to influence the importance of, and therefore the reaction to failure as well, which clearly represents a stressful experience for highly conscientious individuals because of their personal standards, expectations, and behavior, a rather detrimental effect of conscientiousness on well-being possibly depends on the processing of uncontrollable stressful experiences.

The influence of personality on the endocrine stress reaction has been investigated by several studies (Bibbey et al., 2013). The reported null findings concerning conscientiousness (Bibbey et al., 2013) could be due to the controllability of the stressor in these studies, as the effect of conscientiousness is suggested to be dependent upon the degree of control afforded during stress exposure (Bibbey et al., 2013).

In order to investigate the influence of conscientiousness on the neural and endocrine stress reaction, we investigated subjects with different levels of conscientiousness during an fMRI task inducing social evaluative threat and the experience of uncontrollable failure (Lederbogen et al., 2011), the combination of which is known to elicit the strongest stress reaction in a laboratory setting (Dickerson and Kemeny, 2004).

We tested the following parameters: behavior (subjective experience of stress), endocrine stress reaction (cortisol output, i.e. AUCg), and brain activity (fMRI). We hypothesized that highly conscientious participants will be more stressed in response to the task than their less conscientious counterparts reflected by increased levels of behavioral, endocrine, and neural responses to stress. At the neural level, we expected to find an association between conscientiousness and changes in brain activity in those brain areas that have been previously implicated in subjective perception and appraisal of stressful situations, i.e. amygdala, insula, and dACC (Kern et al., 2008, Tillfors et al., 2001, Wang et al., 2005). In addition, as gender differences in stress processing and cortisol response are well known (Duchesne and Pruessner, 2013), we also included sex as a variable of interest.

Section snippets

Participants

We recruited 86 (50 female, 36 male; mean age: 27 (±6.01 years)) healthy volunteers of European descent in Berlin. All participants were screened reporting no acute or chronic diseases, no recreational drug use, no medication and neither personal nor family history of DSM-IV axis I disorders during a structured clinical interview (Wittchen et al., 1997). All subjects met the safety requirements for participation in an fMRI study. The study was approved by the local ethics committee and written

Behavioral results

Conscientiousness was normally distributed, the mean score (33.74 ± 6.34) was slightly below the normal mean (34.5) (Borkenau and Ostendorf, 2008), and the female subjects in our study scored slightly higher than the male subjects (males (32.03 ± 6.9), females (34.98 ± 5.6), F(1.85) = 4.74, p = 0.032, η2 = 0.053). Conscientiousness correlated positively with subjective experience of stress (r = 0.301, p = 0.003, CI: [.06–0.50]). However, as scores for conscientiousness differed significantly between sex, we

Discussion

In the current study we investigated whether conscientiousness could be less advantageous under uncontrollable stress. Highly conscientious individuals were hypothesized to show more signs of stress than less conscientious subjects in response to our social stress paradigm. Indeed, as expected, higher conscientiousness was associated with increased subjective feelings of stress, which was particularly evident in female participants. In addition, in males only, conscientiousness correlated

Limitations

Our study has several limitations. First, our sample included subjects with rather moderate levels of conscientiousness. Although conscientiousness was normally distributed, the mean score (33.7) was slightly below the normal mean (34.5) (Borkenau and Ostendorf, 2008). Further studies are needed to confirm our findings in a sample with more extreme levels of conscientiousness.

Second, albeit the responder rate in our study can be considered high, especially as the usual responder rate for this

Conclusion

This is the first study providing neurobiological evidence for the assumption that conscientiousness is not universally adaptive, but rather associated with either costs or benefits, depending on the situation (Nettle, 2006). Our findings extend this view to the factor of control, which could determine the experience of stress for individuals high in conscientiousness and in this way important health outcomes as well (Chrousos, 2009), suggesting that highly conscientious individuals could be

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Jonas Leppig, Katharina Demin, Mascha Roth, and Luisa Balzus for their assistance in data acquisition as well as Caroline Wackerhagen for her valuable comments

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