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Background: In the past decade, a body of animal and human research has revealed a profound influence of early-life experiences, ranging from variations in parenting behaviour to severe adversity, on hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis regulation in adulthood. In our own previous studies, we have shown how variations in early-life parental care influence the development of the hippocampus and modify the cortisol awakening response. Methods: In the present study, we investigated the influence of early-life maternal care on cortisol, heart rate and subjective psychological responses to the repeated administration of a psychosocial laboratory stressor in a population of 63 healthy young adults. Low, medium and high early-life maternal care groups were identified using the Parental Bonding Instrument. Results: Controlling for the effect of sex, we found an inverted u-shaped relation between increasing levels of maternal care and cortisol stress responsivity. Specifically, overall and stress-induced cortisol levels went from below normal in the low maternal care, to normal in the medium care, back to below normal in the high maternal care groups. We found no group differences with respect to heart rate and subjective psychological stress measures. Whereas low and high maternal care groups exhibited similarly low endocrine stress responses, their psychological profiles were opposed with increased levels of depression and anxiety and decreased self-esteem in the low care group. Limitations: Sex was unequally distributed among maternal care groups, whereby the number of men with low maternal care was too small to allow introducing sex as a second between-group variable. Conclusion: We discuss the potential significance of this dissociation between endocrine and psychological parameters with respect to stress vulnerability and resistance for each maternal care group., Introduction The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis is one of the most important neuroendocrine stress systems. (1) Dysregulations of the HPA axis are implicated in the pathophysiology of stress-related disorders, such as [...]

Background: Our knowledge with respect to psychological, endocrine, and neural correlates of attentional bias in individuals with high vulnerability to developing depression - the subclinically depressed, still remains limited.Design: The study used a 2 × 2 mixed design.Methods: Attentional bias toward happy and sad faces in healthy (N = 26) and subclinically depressed individuals (N = 22) was assessed via a neuroimaging dot-probe attention task. Participants also completed trait and state psychological measures and provided saliva samples for cortisol analysis.Results: The subclinical group showed attentional bias toward happy faces; past use of problem-focused coping strategies when dealing with a personally relevant stressor as well as state levels of anxiety, together, contributed to this bias. In the control group, the happy attentional bias was positively correlated with activity in the right caudate. In the subclinical group, the bias was negatively associated with the left fusiform gyrus and positively with the left inferior parietal lobule and bilateral putamen. We observed group differences in association between cortisol levels during the task and neural activity during happy attentional bias processing within the key regions involved in attention.Conclusions: The attentional bias toward happy faces may reflect an active coping attempt by the subclinical participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]