Stress across timescales: differential effects of acute and chronic stress on auditory processing and perception.

Stress has long been linked to auditory dysfunction and altered sound perception, but its effects are often discussed without fully distinguishing between acute and chronic stress timescales. Here, we integrate evidence that acute and chronic stress engage partly overlapping but temporally distinct mechanisms and produce different auditory outcomes. Acute stress triggers rapid neuromodulatory and hormonal responses that can transiently alter auditory filtering, deviance detection, attention, and sound sensitivity, often biasing the system toward heightened salience and vigilance. In contrast, chronic stress is associated with more persistent changes in auditory attention, loudness perception, sound tolerance, and central auditory coding, reflecting longer-term alterations in circuit function and baseline regulation. In this review, we examine how acute and chronic stress influence auditory processing and perception in adulthood across human and animal studies, drawing together behavioral, physiological, and circuit-level findings. We highlight candidate mechanisms including glucocorticoid and catecholamine signaling, shifts in excitation-inhibition balance, altered thalamocortical and amygdala-related interactions, and stress-driven plasticity within mature auditory networks. We argue that chronic stress should not be viewed simply as a prolonged version of acute stress, but rather as a distinct state that may involve longer-lasting changes in auditory coding, baseline regulation, and perceptual weighting. Organizing stress effects by timescale may provide a framework for interpreting stress-related listening difficulties and for informing clinical conditions such as tinnitus, hyperacusis, and impaired hearing in noisy environments.