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Researchers identify brain patterns that help people cope with stress
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A team of researchers identified brain patterns that appear to underlie healthy emotional and behavioral responses to stress.
Rajita Sinha, PhD, along with Dongju Seo, PhD, and colleagues at Yale University, with support from the NIH, sought to understand why some people cope with stress better than others. The researchers used functional MRI to measure localized changes in brain activation during stress in healthy volunteers, according to a press release.
The scans revealed three patterns in response to stress. The first pattern was characterized by sustained activation of the brain regions that are known to signal, monitor and process potential threats. The second pattern was characterized by increased, and then decreased, activation of a circuit connecting areas of the brain involved in stress reaction and adaptation. The third pattern — “neuroflexibility” — was characterized by initially decreased activation of a circuit between the medial prefrontal cortex and forebrain regions during stress exposure, followed by increased activation with sustained stress exposure, according to the release.
“This [third pattern] seems to be the area of the brain which mobilizes to regain control over our response to stress,” Sinha, professor of psychiatry and director of the Yale Stress Center, stated in the release.
In the new study, people who did not show the “neuroflexibility” response in the prefrontal cortex during stress exhibited higher levels of self-reported binge drinking, anger outbursts and other maladaptive coping behaviors.
“This important finding points to specific brain adaptations that predict resilient responses to stress,” George F. Koob, PhD, director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, stated in the release. “The findings also indicate that we might be able to predict maladaptive stress responses that contribute to excessive drinking, anger, and other unhealthy reactions to stress.”
The findings were also published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Disclosure: Koob and Sinha report no conflicts of interest.