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Work-related social support modulates effects of early life stress on limbic reactivity during stress

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Abstract

Early life stress (ELS) affects stress- reactivity via limbic brain regions implicated such as hippocampus and amygdala. Social support is a major protective factor against ELS effects, while subjects with ELS experience reportedly perceive less of it in their daily life. The workplace, where most adults spend a substantial amount of time in their daily lives, might serve as a major resource for social support. Since previous data demonstrated that social support attenuates stress reactivity, we here used a psychosocial stress task to test the hypothesis that work-related social support modulates the effects of ELS. Results show decreased amygdala reactivity during stress in ELS subjects who report high levels of work- related social support, thereby indicating a signature for reduced stress reactivity. However, this effect was only observable on the neural, but not on the behavioral level, since social support had no buffering effect regarding the subjective experience of stress in daily life as well as regarding feelings of uncontrollability induced by the stress task. Accordingly, our data suggest that subjects with ELS experiences might benefit from interventions targeted at lowering their subjective stress levels by helping them to better perceive the availability of social support in their daily lives.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Dr. Jens Prüssner (University of Konstanz) for making the Montreal Imaging Stress Task (MIST) available to us.

Funding

This work was supported by the German Research Foundation [DFG, GR 4510 to SG].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Buisness Ethics, University of St. Gallen, Dufourstrasse 40a, CH, 9000, St. Gallen, Switzerland

    Ulrich Leicht-Deobald

  2. Institute for Leadership and HR Management, University of St. Gallen, Dufourstrasse 40a, CH, 9000, St. Gallen, Switzerland

    Heike Bruch

  3. Department of Psychiatry, Campus Benjamin Franklin, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Hindenburgdamm 30, 12200, Berlin, Germany

    Luisa Bönke, Amie Stevense, Yan Fan, Malek Bajbouj & Simone Grimm

  4. Clinic for Affective Disorders and General Psychiatry, Psychiatric University Hospital Zurich, Lenggstrasse 31, 8032, Zurich, Switzerland

    Simone Grimm

  5. Medical School Berlin, Calandrellistraße 1-9, 12247, Berlin, Germany

    Simone Grimm

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  1. Ulrich Leicht-Deobald
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  2. Heike Bruch
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  3. Luisa Bönke
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  5. Yan Fan
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  7. Simone Grimm
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Correspondence to Simone Grimm.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Leicht-Deobald, U., Bruch, H., Bönke, L. et al. Work-related social support modulates effects of early life stress on limbic reactivity during stress. Brain Imaging and Behavior 12, 1405–1418 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11682-017-9810-z

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