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The influence of personality factors, school achievement goals, academic efficacy, and stressload of serious problems on final grades was studied by giving a questionnaire, The Perceived Stress and Control Assessment Scale, to 915 Swedish high school students. A new measure, Stressload Index, was created by extending the Control-Stress Index. Structural Equation Modeling analysis revealed that the variance in final grades was explained by four predictors, namely academic efficacy, stressload of serious problems, neuroticism, and extraversion, to 13%, academic efficacy contributing most. The effect of stressload of serious problems was shown to be negative. The influence of extraversion was negative, whereas neuroticism had a positive effect on final grades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: The impact of chronic exposure to environmental adversities on brain regions involved in cognition and mental health depends on whether it occurs during the perinatal period, childhood, adolescence or adulthood. The effects of these adversities on the brain and behavior arise as a function of the timing of the exposure and their co-occurrence with the development of specific regions. Here we aimed to explore the behavioral phenotypes derived from two nutritional stress paradigms which differed in the timing of exposure: a low-protein perinatal diet during gestation and lactation and a low-protein diet during adolescence. Methods: Locomotor and exploratory activity, recognition memory and aversive memory were measured in CF-1 8-week-old male mice subjected to perinatal malnutrition (LP-P) or adolescent malnutrition (LP-A), and their respective controls with normal protein diet (NP-P and NP-A). Results: By using the open field test, we found that LP-P and LP-A mice showed reduced exploratory activity compared to controls, but no alterations in their locomotor activity. Recognition memory was impaired only in LP-P mice. Interestingly, aversive memory was not altered in LP-P mice but was enhanced in LP-A mice. Considering the stress-inoculation theory, we hypothesized that protein malnutrition during adolescence represents a challenging but still moderate stressful environment, which promotes active coping in face of later adversity. Conclusion: Our results indicate that while perinatal malnutrition impairs recognition memory, adolescent malnutrition enhances aversive memory, showing dissimilar adaptive responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stress during adolescence has profound effects on the onset and severity of substance use later in life. However, not everyone with adverse experiences during this period will go on to develop a substance use disorder in adulthood, and the factors that alter susceptibility to substance use remain unknown. Here, we investigated individual differences in response to stress and drugs of abuse using our selectively bred high-responder (bHR) and low-responder (bLR) rats. These animals model extremes of temperamental tendencies and differ dramatically in both stress responsiveness and addiction-related traits. The present study investigated how environmental interventions in the form of a chronic variable stress (CVS) regimen in early adolescence interact with the bHR/bLR phenotype to alter behavioral sensitization to cocaine in adulthood. We also determined whether accumbal dopamine signaling is involved in the interaction of stress history and cocaine by assessing the mRNA levels of dopamine D1 (D1R) and D2 (D2R) receptors. Our results showed that CVS history alone had enduring and phenotype-specific effects on accumbal dopamine signaling. Importantly, adolescent stress had opposing effects in the two lines- decreasing the locomotor response to cocaine challenge in bHRs but increasing this measure in bLRs. Moreover, these opposing effects on cocaine sensitivity following adolescent CVS were accompanied by parallel effects in the accumbal dopamine system, with prior stress and cocaine exposure interacting to decrease D2R mRNA in bHRs but increase it in bLRs. Overall, these findings indicate that environmental challenges encountered in adolescence interact with genetic background to alter vulnerability to cocaine later in life. Stress experienced during adolescence affects the onset and severity of drug dependence later in life. However, not everyone with adverse experiences during this period will go on to develop SUD in adulthood. Using a rat model of innate differences in emotional reactivity, this study shows that the interplay between individual temperament and previous experience of adolescent stress/trauma determines whether an individual will be vulnerable or resilient to develop SUDs later in life. In addition, the present study shows that the dopamine D2 receptor in the brain's reward center, nucleus accumbens, may be implicated in this interplay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A broad stream of research strives to understand stress directly or indirectly resulting from the use of information and communication technology (ICT), commonly referred to as technostress. A group at high risk of suffering from the consequences of technostress is adolescents because they grow up using ICT daily and are still developing their identity, acquiring mental strength, and adopting essential social skills. Our research combines a qualitative and a quantitative study and contributes to an understanding of what strategies adolescents use to cope with the demands of ICT use. In qualitative workshops with adolescents, we collect 30 coping responses in five categories. A subsequent quantitative study finds gender- and age-related differences in adolescents' perception of technostress and concludes that adolescents as a group activate a broad portfolio of coping responses. Exploratory factor analysis reveals five factors underlying adolescents' activation of coping responses: Avoid Stressful ICT, Follow the Rules, Use ICT Consciously, Contain Negative Emotions, and Acquire ICT. We find that the coping responses related to the Avoid Stressful ICT factor are significantly more common among girls than boys and derive that adolescents who own more devices might have a lower tendency to Follow the Rules. A joint analysis of coping responses and technostress creators reveals that, not surprisingly, coping increases with higher intensity of technostress, but some coping responses break out of this pattern. With this research, we contribute to the theoretical and empirical understanding of an important phenomenon associated with digitalization's dark sides (technostress coping) in an important yet understudied population (adolescents 10–17 years of age). Future research may build on our work and investigate additional parameters determining differences in adolescents' coping behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The glucocorticoid hypothesis suggests that overexposure to stress may cause permanent upregulation of cortisol. Stress in youth may therefore influence cortisol levels even in older age. Using data from the 6-Day Sample, we investigated the effects of high stress in childhood, adolescence and early adulthood – as well as individual variables contributing to these measures; parental loss, social deprivation, school and home moves, illness, divorce and job instability – upon cortisol levels at age 77 years. Waking, waking +45 min (peak) and evening salivary cortisol samples were collected from 159 participants, and the 150 who were not using steroid medications were included in this study. After correcting for multiple comparisons, the only significant association was between early-adulthood job instability and later-life peak cortisol levels. After excluding participants with dementia or possible mild cognitive impairment, early-adulthood high stress showed significant associations with lower evening and mean cortisol levels, suggesting downregulation by stress, but these results did not survive correction for multiple comparisons. Overall, our results do not provide strong evidence of a relationship between stress in youth and later-life cortisol levels, but do suggest that some more long-term stressors, such as job instability, may indeed produce lasting upregulation of cortisol, persisting into the mid-to-late seventies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]