EEG Microstates and Psychosocial Stress During an Exchange Year

The well-known stress vulnerability model of psychosis assumes that psychotic episodes result from the coincidence of individual trait dispositions and triggering stressors. We thus hypothesized that a transient psychosocial stressor would not only increase the number of and stress caused by psychosis-like symptoms (like delusion-like symptoms or auditory hallucinations) in healthy subjects but also elicit changes in EEG microstates that have been related to the presence of psychotic symptoms in patients with schizophrenia. Considering a radical change of one’s psychosocial environment as a significant stressor, we analyzed psychotic symptoms and EEG microstate data in teenage exchange-students at an early and a later phase of their stay. The subjects experienced a small and transient, but significant increase of stress by psychosis-like symptoms. These changes in mental state were associated with increases in microstate class A, which has previously been related to unspecific stress. microstate classes C and D, which have consistently been found to be altered in patients with psychosis, were found unaffected by the time of the recording and the subjective stress experiences. Therefore, we conclude that microstate class A appears to be a psychosis independent and rather general correlate of psychosocial stress, whereas changes in microstate classes C and D seem to be more specifically tied to the presence of psychotic symptoms.