Lower perceived stress enhances neural synchrony in perceptual and attentional cortices during naturalistic processing

Perceived stress is the subjective appraisal of the level of stress experienced by an individual in response to external or internal demands. Recent research on perceived stress has highlighted its role in influencing cognition, leading to a disruption in cognitive processes, such as emotional processing, attention, and perception. However, most neuroimaging studies examining stress have used static stimuli (e.g., still images) that do not encapsulate real-life multimodal processing in the brain. The current research uses data from the Naturalistic Neuroimaging Database (v2.0; Aliko et al., 2020) to examine differences in neural synchrony (as measured by intersubject correlations; ISCs) associated with perceived stress using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We evaluated how self-reported perceived stress levels influence neural synchrony patterns in response to different naturalistic stimuli by examining the differences in neural synchrony between individuals with low and high perceived stress levels. We determined that lower perceived stress was observed with greater neural synchrony areas associated with perceptual and attention processing, including the lateral occipital cortex, superior temporal gyrus, superior parietal lobule, orbital frontal cortex, and the occipital pole. These results indicate that high levels of perceived stress heavily alter neural processing of complex audiovisual stimuli. Together, these results provide evidence that perceived stress influences cognitive processing in everyday life.