8,268 research outputs found

    Cardiovascular and cortisol reactions to acute psychological stress and cognitive ability in the Dutch Famine Birth Cohort Study

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    Objective: Recently, in analyses of data from a large community sample, negative cross-sectional and prospective associations between cardiac stress reactivity and obesity were observed. The present study re-examined the association between cardiovascular reactivity and adiposity in the Dutch Famine Birth Cohort, with the additional aim of examining the association between cortisol reactivity and adiposity. Methods: Blood pressure, heart rate, and salivary cortisol were measured at rest and in response to standard laboratory stress tasks in 725 adults. Height, weight, waist and hip circumference, and skin fold thickness were measured. Four to seven years later 460 participants reported current height and weight. Obesity was defined as a BMI > 30kg/m2. Results: Cross-sectional analyses revealed negative associations between all measures of adiposity and heart rate reactivity; those with a greater BMI (ß = -0.39 bpm), waist-hip ratio (ß = -0.15 bpm), and triceps and subscapular skin fold thicknesses (ß = -1.0 bpm and -1.8 bpm), or categorized as obese (-3.9 bpm) displayed smaller cardiac reactions to acute stress (all p <.001). With the exception of waist-hip ratio, the same negative associations emerged for cortisol reactivity (all p ≤ .01). In prospective analyses, low cardiac reactivity was associated with an increased likelihood of becoming or remaining obese in the subsequent 4-7 years (OR 1.03, p = .01). All associations withstood adjustment for a range of possible confounders. Conclusions: The present analyses provide additional support for the hypothesis that it is low not high cardiac and cortisol stress reactivity that is related to adiposity

    More than a feeling: A unified view of stress measurement for population science.

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    Stress can influence health throughout the lifespan, yet there is little agreement about what types and aspects of stress matter most for human health and disease. This is in part because "stress" is not a monolithic concept but rather, an emergent process that involves interactions between individual and environmental factors, historical and current events, allostatic states, and psychological and physiological reactivity. Many of these processes alone have been labeled as "stress." Stress science would be further advanced if researchers adopted a common conceptual model that incorporates epidemiological, affective, and psychophysiological perspectives, with more precise language for describing stress measures. We articulate an integrative working model, highlighting how stressor exposures across the life course influence habitual responding and stress reactivity, and how health behaviors interact with stress. We offer a Stress Typology articulating timescales for stress measurement - acute, event-based, daily, and chronic - and more precise language for dimensions of stress measurement

    Depression-related difficulties disengaging from negative faces are associated with sustained attention to negative feedback during social evaluation and predict stress recovery

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    The present study aimed to clarify: 1) the presence of depression-related attention bias related to a social stressor, 2) its association with depression-related attention biases as measured under standard conditions, and 3) their association with impaired stress recovery in depression. A sample of 39 participants reporting a broad range of depression levels completed a standard eye-tracking paradigm in which they had to engage/disengage their gaze with/from emotional faces. Participants then underwent a stress induction (i.e., giving a speech), in which their eye movements to false emotional feedback were measured, and stress reactivity and recovery were assessed. Depression level was associated with longer times to engage/disengage attention with/from negative faces under standard conditions and with sustained attention to negative feedback during the speech. These depression-related biases were associated and mediated the association between depression level and self-reported stress recovery, predicting lower recovery from stress after giving the speech

    Ubiquitous emotion-aware computing

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    Emotions are a crucial element for personal and ubiquitous computing. What to sense and how to sense it, however, remain a challenge. This study explores the rare combination of speech, electrocardiogram, and a revised Self-Assessment Mannequin to assess people’s emotions. 40 people watched 30 International Affective Picture System pictures in either an office or a living-room environment. Additionally, their personality traits neuroticism and extroversion and demographic information (i.e., gender, nationality, and level of education) were recorded. The resulting data were analyzed using both basic emotion categories and the valence--arousal model, which enabled a comparison between both representations. The combination of heart rate variability and three speech measures (i.e., variability of the fundamental frequency of pitch (F0), intensity, and energy) explained 90% (p < .001) of the participants’ experienced valence--arousal, with 88% for valence and 99% for arousal (ps < .001). The six basic emotions could also be discriminated (p < .001), although the explained variance was much lower: 18–20%. Environment (or context), the personality trait neuroticism, and gender proved to be useful when a nuanced assessment of people’s emotions was needed. Taken together, this study provides a significant leap toward robust, generic, and ubiquitous emotion-aware computing

    Association between changes in heart rate variability during the anticipation of a stressful situation and the stress-induced cortisol response

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    Vagal activity - reflecting the activation of stress regulatory mechanisms and prefrontal cortex activation - is thought to play an inhibitory role in the regulation of the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis. However, most studies investigating the association between stress-induced changes in heart rate variability (HRV, an index of cardiac vagal tone) and cortisol have shown a non-significant relationship. It has been proposed that physiological changes observed during anticipation of a stressor allow individuals to make behavioral, cognitive, and physiological adjustments that are necessary to deal with the upcoming actual stressor. In this study, in a large sample of 171 healthy adults (96 men and 75 women; mean age = 29.98, SD = 11.07), we investigated whether the cortisol response to a laboratory-based stress task was related to anticipation-induced or stress task-induced changes in HRV. As expected, regression analyses showed that a larger decrease in HRV during the anticipation of a stress task was related to higher stress task-induced cortisol increase, but not cortisol recovery. In line with prior research, the stress task-induced change in HRV was not significantly related to cortisol increase or recovery. Our results show for the first time that anticipatory HRV (reflecting differences in stress regulation and prefrontal activity before the encounter with the stressor) is important to understand the stress-induced cortisol increase

    Aerospace Medicine and Biology: A continuing bibliography with indexes, supplement 217, March 1981

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    Approximately 130 reports, articles, and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system in February 1981 are included in this bibliography. Topics include aerospace medicine and biology

    Aerospace Medicine and Biology: A continuing bibliography with indexes, supplement 127, April 1974

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    This special bibliography lists 279 reports, articles, and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system in March 1974
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