Identification of normative neural stress response patterns: applying neuroimaging statistics to psychobiological data

• Applicant: Dr. Gina-Isabelle Henze
• Subject Area: Biological Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 513531314

Stress and stress-related diseases are a central social problem. Although animal studies have fundamentally contributed to our knowledge of the biological mechanisms of stress, both qualitative and quantitative differences exist in the transferability to humans, especially with regard to neural responses. In order to adequately study neural stress processing in humans, fMRI-compatible stress experiments such as the ScanSTRESS paradigm have been developed. ScanSTRESS is a psychosocial stress induction paradigm and has been able to elicit affective, endocrine, physiological, and neural stress responses in various studies. Based on the triple network of neural stress processing and studies that used psychosocial stressors such as ScanSTRESS, the hypothesis derived that psychosocial stress in particular activates only two of the three stress networks. In addition to the salience network (SN), which includes the amygdala, insula and anterior cingulate, among others, the default mode network (DMN), which includes the medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate and, more broadly, the hippocampus, also appears to be involved in psychosocial stress processing. However, the typical components of psychosocial paradigms, especially negative feedback, seem to elicit less reactivity in the third stress network, the central executive network (CEN). The first aim of the project is therefore to comprehensively review this hypothesis in the existing literature on psychosocial stress processing in the brain and to confirm, using (partly) already published ScanSTRESS datasets, that structures of the SN and DMN, but less those of the CEN, are involved in the neural processing of psychosocial stress. In addition to such task-based fMRI measurements, resting state (RS) scans are also relevant in biopsychological-neuroscientific stress research, as they allow statements to be made about the functional connectivity (FC) of individual structures/networks. Moreover, repeated RS scans can be generated, for example, to evaluate changes in the FC of said stress networks. Given that such pre-post RS measurements are also available for the aforementioned ScanSTRESS data (before and after stress induction), the so-called Sandwich Estimator will be used to determine FC changes in the stress-relevant networks, taking further predictors such as sex and stress-induced cortisol increases into account. Finally, the overall aim of the project is to identify and validate normative stress response patterns (normative modelling). Such normative patterns, derived from healthy subjects, should make it possible to detect and quantify deviations in future (pre-)clinical samples exposed to repeated or chronic stress.

• DFG Programme: WBP Position