Acute stress is ubiquitous in everyday life, but the extent to which acute stress affects how people learn from the outcomes of their choices is still poorly understood. Here, we investigate how acute stress impacts reward and punishment learning in men using a reinforcement-learning task. Sixty-two male participants performed the task whilst under stress and control conditions. We observed that acute stress impaired participants’ choice performance towards monetary gains, but not losses. To unravel the mechanism(s) underlying such impairment, we fitted a reinforcement-learning model to participants’ trial-by-trial choices. Computational modeling indicated that under acute stress participants learned more slowly from positive prediction errors — when the outcomes were better than expected — consistent with stress-induced dopamine disruptions. Such mechanistic understanding of how acute stress impairs reward learning is particularly important given the pervasiveness of stress in our daily life and the impact that stress can have on our wellbeing and mental health.

急性压力在日常生活中无处不在，但人们对急性压力影响人们如何从选择的结果中学习的程度仍知之甚少。在这里，我们使用强化学习任务研究急性压力如何影响男性的奖惩学习。62名男性参与者在压力和控制条件下完成了任务。我们观察到，剧烈的压力会损害参与者对金钱收益的选择表现，但对损失没有影响。为了弄清这种损害的潜在机制，我们将强化学习模型拟合到参与者的逐项试验选择中。计算模型表明，在急性压力下，参与者从积极的预测错误中学习得更慢（当结果好于预期时），这与压力引起的多巴胺破坏相一致。