Introduction
’ behavior
STRESSFUL EVENTS, BLOOM, CORTEX
To form and maintain social relationships, we frequently rely on social cognitive skills. But how do these skills work under stressful circumstances? In the present study we examined whether stress-induced cortisol elevations affect participants’ performance in a false-belief task.Stress arises when individuals perceive a threat to their physiological or psychological well-being [A few studies investigated the effect of stress on social cognition so far. One study [According to previous stress research, there are several reasons to assume that stress affects Theory of Mind. First, there is a very high density of glucocorticoid and mineralocorticoid receptors in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) indicating that this area is highly stress sensitive [Second, coping with stressful events includes a shift towards less demanding cognitive processes (for a review, see [A stress-related shift towards less (PFC-) demanding processes may also occur with regard to social cognition. False-belief tasks are frequently used as a measure of Theory-of-Mind performance [To examine whether a stress-induced cortisol increase affects the prediction of others’ behavior, we exposed participants to an acute stressor or a control condition prior to conducting a false-belief procedure based on Birch and Bloom’s task [We also hypothesized that stressed participants would be biased by their own knowledge in a false-belief task more often than control participants. That is, they would be more likely to predict that the protagonist would look for the violin at its current location than participants in the control condition.