ArticleBiological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging2023
Prolonged Physiological Stress Is Associated With a Lower Rate of Exploratory Learning That Is Compounded by Depression.
Article in Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 18 citations in OpenAlex.
- Foraging models explain human exploration in uncertain tasks.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Artificial Intelligence-Empowered Multimodal Learning in Psychiatry: A Scoping Review.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2026Review
- Pupil size predicts exploration through critical slowing in prefrontal dynamics.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Prefrontal Network Mechanisms of Psychiatric Deep Brain Stimulation.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Review
- Distinct Computational Mechanisms of Uncertainty Processing Explain Opposing Exploratory Behaviors in Anxiety and Apathy.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2025Article
- Individual differences in sequential decision-making.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Pupil size predicts the onset of exploration and changes in prefrontal dynamics.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Social aloofness is associated with non-social explore-exploit decisions.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Beyond reward learning deficits: Exploration-exploitation instability reveals computational heterogeneity in value-based decision making in early psychosis.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025Article
- Article
- Dopamine and Norepinephrine Differentially Mediate the Exploration-Exploitation Tradeoff.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- Reviewing explore/exploit decision-making as a transdiagnostic target for psychosis, depression, and anxiety.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2024Review
- Effects of Vibroacoustic Stimulation on Psychological, Physiological, and Cognitive Stress.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
9 authors at 4 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundStress is a major risk factor for depression, and both are associated with important changes in decision-making patterns. However, decades of research have only weakly connected physiological measurements of stress to the subjective experience of depression. Here, we examined the relationship between prolonged physiological stress, mood, and explore-exploit decision making in a population navigating a dynamic environment under stress: health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
methodsWe measured hair cortisol levels in health care workers who completed symptom surveys and performed an explore-exploit restless-bandit decision-making task; 32 participants were included in the final analysis. Hidden Markov and reinforcement learning models assessed task behavior.
resultsParticipants with higher hair cortisol exhibited less exploration (r = -0.36, p = .046). Higher cortisol levels predicted less learning during exploration (β = -0.42, false discovery rate [FDR]-corrected p [p
conclusionsThese results imply that prolonged physiological stress may limit learning from new information and lead to cognitive rigidity, potentially contributing to burnout. Decision-making measures link subjective mood states to measured physiological stress, suggesting that they should be incorporated into future biomarker studies of mood and stress conditions.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.