Discussion
Habitual behavior, Laboratory stressors, habitual behavior
The present study investigated the effect of acute stress on the performance in a false-belief task. The SECPT resulted in a cortisol increase compared to the non-stressful control procedure. Participants from both conditions did not differ in their tendency to attribute their own knowledge to the protagonist. Thus, stressed participants were not cursed any more by their own knowledge when reasoning about the protagonist’s false belief than were their non-stressed counterparts. However, stressed participants did show a stronger tendency to assume that the protagonist’s future behavior would be a repetition of his former behavior compared to non-stressed participants. Specifically, compared to the control condition, participants in the stress condition rated it more likely that the protagonist would look for his object at the original location. This finding ties in with studies suggesting that stress causes a shift from goal-directed to habitual behavior [Habitual behavior is less resource demanding and allows fast reactions which are often needed in stressful situations [A recent study revealed that stressed participants were faster in the detection and extraction of probability-based regularities in a reaction time task compared to a control condition [In contrast to our second hypothesis, stress did not affect the attribution of a false belief. Participants in the stress condition did not show a stronger bias towards their own knowledge compared to participants in the control condition. This is surprising because of the high stress-sensitivity of the PFC [Salivary cortisol concentrations are influenced by menstrual cycle phases or the use of oral contraceptives [Laboratory stressors typically induce acute and temporary responses. Ethical considerations do not allow inducing chronic stress. However, questionnaires or interviews could be used to investigate the association between chronical stress and social cognition. Chronical stress is associated with structural changes in the PFC [