A study from the Department of Neuroscience at Cornell University Medical College confirms that chronic psychological stress weakens attentional control in the human brain and increases the risk of developing psychological stress-induced cognitive dysfunction. Chronic psychological stress is a clear risk factor for psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, and stress can also disrupt creativity, flexible problem-solving skills, and working memory in healthy people. Attention is the ability of a person’s mental activity to be directed and focused on something, and is a common mental characteristic that accompanies mental processes such as perception, memory, thinking, and imagination. Without attention, people’s various intellectual factors, observation, memory, imagination, and thinking, would be uncontrolled without some support. Psychological stress specifically impairs an individual’s attentional control and interferes with the functional links of the relevant brain regions (frontoparietal networks that mediate attentional shifts). However, this effect is reversible and brain attentional control is restored after a period of stress reduction, i.e., when stress is reduced. Healthy populations are adaptive to psychological stress, and individuals with disrupted stress adaptation may be susceptible to psychological stress-induced cognitive dysfunction. Thus, individuals have a certain plasticity in their prefrontal cortical attentional control network, and disruption of this plasticity may be one of the necessary conditions for increased susceptibility to stress-related mental abnormalities in cognitive dysfunction.