Hormonal Contraceptive Use and Acute Stress Reactivity: Examining Autonomic Responses and Affective States in Young Women
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Emerging adulthood is marked by significant stressful events and life transitions that may increase vulnerability to distress. Young women in particular report higher stress levels compared to men, and sex hormones could be involved. Hormone level fluctuations at this critical age, may be especially sensitive to hormonal contraceptive (HC) manipulation, leading to altered stress reactivity. Thus, the current study examined stress, affective states and autonomic stress responses among naturally-cycling women, combined estrogen-progestin users and progestin-only users following an acute stressor. Young women (N=126) completed baseline questionnaires assessing mood and stress scores. Participants were randomly assigned to a stressor task (n=57) or a control task (n=69), after which mood dimensions were assessed. Heart rate was monitored via smartwatch at six timepoints across the study. Interestingly, interactions between time, HC type, and task condition for heart rate were trending towards significance (p=0.06), with HC users showing elevated heart rate during the stressor compared to naturally-cycling women over time. Progestin-only users in the stressor group displayed increased feelings of sadness (p=0.03), anger (p<0.001), and fear (p=0.008), compared to controls (an effect not found for combined users or naturally-cycling women), whereas feelings of shame (p<0.001) were elevated among all women in the stressor group compared to the control group. Together, HC use and type of contraceptive may be associated with exaggerated physiological stress reactivity and negative mood states. These findings provide insights into the effects of HCs on stress processes, supporting more evidence-based decision making in young women considering HCs.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".