On 23 March 2023, Greta Mikneviciute defended her thesis entitled "Psychophysiological and cognitive effects of acute stress in young and older adults" and obtained her doctorate in psychology from the University of Geneva. The LIVES Centre warmly congratulates her on this great achievement!
Many studies focus on the effects of aging or acute stress, but less is known about the combined effects of aging and acute stress. Dr Mikneviciute's work used both a meta-analytical and experimental approach to fill in this research gap. The results of a systematic literature review of 22 studies showed that stress has negative effects on older adults’ verbal fluency, null-to-negative effects on episodic memory, null effects on executive functions, and enhancing effects on working memory. The results of an experimental study using the Trier Social Stress Test in healthy young and older adults further showed that older (vs. young) adults were not only less physiologically reactive but anticipated the stressor more positively, while reporting the same levels of subjective stress as young adults after the stress induction. Moreover, while stress did not affect young adults' cognitive performance, it improved older adults' ability to ignore distractors on a novel task but impaired their performance on a practiced task. In sum, these results suggest that healthy older adults might be more resilient to psychosocial stress than young adults and that their cognitive performance might even benefit from acute stress under certain circumstances.