Stress triggers our habitual behaviors

Schwabe and Wolf at Ruhr University in Bochum show that stress promotes habits at the expense of goal-directed performance in humans. Converging lines of evidence show that stress and the glucocorticoid stress hormones (mainly cortisol in humans) released from the adrenal cortex can operate as a switch between "cognitive" (mediated by prefrontal cortex) and "habit" (mediated by striatum)learning systems.