Understanding the Physiological effect of Audio stimulus on Females using HRV and Cardiac Electrophysiology Analysis

The current study deciphers the effect of an audio stimulus (Indian classical music) on the autonomic nervous system (ANS) and the cardiac electrophysiology of female volunteers. Electrocardiogram (ECG) readings were obtained from ten volunteers for audio stimulus before and after exposing them to the respective stimuli. Various R-R interval (RRI) based analyses (like Recurrence and HRV analysis) were performed to understand the changes in the ANS and the cardiac electrophysiology. HRV analysis indicated an overall parasympathetic dominance after exposure to the audio stimulus

Does context matter in misophonia? : a multi-method experimental investigation

Introduction: Misophonia is a recently defined disorder in which certain aversive repetitive sounds and associated stimuli elicit distressing and impairing affective, behavioral, and physiological responses. The responses in misophonia may be stronger when the sound is produced by close friends and family, suggesting that the context in which a triggering cue occurs may have an important role in misophonia. As such, the goal of this study was to test experimentally whether the context of the sound source influences affective and psychophysiological responses to triggering stimuli in misophonia. Methods: Sixty one adults with misophonia and 45 controls listened to audio recordings (8 s) of human eating, animals eating, and human mouth smacking sounds (without eating). After a break, the same audio recordings were presented embedded within videos of human eating (congruent stimuli), animals eating (congruent stimuli), and, in the mouth smacking condition, with visually incongruent stimuli (hands playing in mud or in a bowl with a watery dough). Psychophysiological responses - skin conductance response (SCR) and heart rate (HR), and self-reported affective responses (valence, arousal, dominance) were gathered during the experiment in a laboratory. Results: Participants with misophonia assessed all the stimuli as more negative and arousing than the controls, and reported feeling less dominant with respect to the sounds. Animal and mouth smacking sounds were assessed by all the participants as less negative and arousing than human eating sounds, but only in the audio-video conditions. SCR data partially confirmed increased psychophysiological arousal in misophonia participants during an exposure to mouth sounds, but did not reflect the self-report changes in response to different contexts. Misophonia participants had deeper deceleration of HR than controls during human eating sound with congruent video stimuli, while there was no group difference during human mouth smacking with incongruent video stimuli. Conclusion: Results suggest that the context of mouth sounds influences affective experiences in adults with misophonia, but also in participants without misophonia. Presentation of animal eating sounds with congruent visual stimuli, or human mouth smacking sounds with incongruent stimuli, decreased self-report reaction to common misophonic triggers

Effect of Relaxation on Neuro-Immune Responses of Persons Undergoing Chemotherapy

Chemotherapy can be considered both a physiologic and a psychological stressor. Anxiety, nausea, emesis, and immunosuppression are commonly associated with chemotherapy, and may adversely affect the outcome or the process of treatment. Chemotherapy-related anxiety can exacerbate negative side-effects. Some psychological stressors, such as anxiety, can result in down-regulation of certain immune functions. Studies have demonstrated that behavioral interventions, such as specific relaxation strategies, can modify stress-related immune modulation. These behavioral interventions have also been shown to decrease the degree of nausea and vomiting associated with chemotherapy. The purpose of this study was to examine whether a relaxation intervention would result in decreased anxiety, decreased nausea and vomiting, and decreased immune modulation in persons undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer. A baseline neuro-immune assessment, including immune function tests, state and trait anxiety, and serum catecholamines, was performed on 12 women diagnosed with breast cancer and slated to undergo four cycles of Adriamycin/Cytoxan (AC) chemotherapy. Subjects were assigned to an experimental or a control group. The control group underwent chemotherapy according to the prescribed AC regimen. The experimental group underwent the same chemotherapy and a relaxation intervention. The neuro-immune assessment was repeated just before subjects received the third and fourth chemotherapy infusions, with the addition of assessment of nausea and emesis. Study findings revealed that state anxiety was significantly lower at measure two for the experimental group (t = 3.20, p = 0.02). No significant difference in anticipatory nausea and vomiting was found between groups. Evaluation of immune function tests was inconclusive. These findings suggest that a relaxation intervention may lower anxiety in individuals who are undergoing chemotherapy. Future research efforts should continue to explore whether relaxation interventions can modify the degree of side effects associated with chemotherapy, and potentially improve the quality of life for persons requiring the treatment

On the Recognition of Emotion from Physiological Data

This work encompasses several objectives, but is primarily concerned with an experiment where 33 participants were shown 32 slides in order to create ‗weakly induced emotions‘. Recordings of the participants‘ physiological state were taken as well as a self report of their emotional state. We then used an assortment of classifiers to predict emotional state from the recorded physiological signals, a process known as Physiological Pattern Recognition (PPR). We investigated techniques for recording, processing and extracting features from six different physiological signals: Electrocardiogram (ECG), Blood Volume Pulse (BVP), Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), Electromyography (EMG), for the corrugator muscle, skin temperature for the finger and respiratory rate. Improvements to the state of PPR emotion detection were made by allowing for 9 different weakly induced emotional states to be detected at nearly 65% accuracy. This is an improvement in the number of states readily detectable. The work presents many investigations into numerical feature extraction from physiological signals and has a chapter dedicated to collating and trialing facial electromyography techniques. There is also a hardware device we created to collect participant self reported emotional states which showed several improvements to experimental procedure

Public policy, social marketing and neuromarketing: from addressing the consumer behaviour to addressing the social behaviour - a study on the assessment of Public Service Announcements’ efficacy by neuro-metric indexes and techniques

The overall aim of this thesis is to investigate to what extent marketing can be a useful science for the public policy in developing effective Public Service Announcements (PSAs). In particular, hereby a specific discipline will be taken in consideration: the one that merges marketing with neuroscience, that is the so-called ‘neuromarketing’, which - in order to assess the advertising efficacy - adopts biometric and neurometric indexes. The objective of this work is to gain insights into the above-mentioned fields (marketing, neuroscience and public policy) by: - reviewing previous studies, as well as topical literature; - exploring the latest case studies and best practises; - examining the traditional methods’ results for the assessment of the PSAs (i.e. polls, surveys, focus groups) in their evolutionary path (till arriving to birth of the the neurometric methods) Such kind of research has the purpose to identify the factors that are considered relevant to answer the ultimate research question: is it possible today, by using state-of-the-art neurometric indexes and techniques, to provide policymakers with precise guidelines for developing effective PSAs, so that marketing will be able to address no more just the consumer behaviour, but also the social behaviour? In fact, the goal of any advertising campaign is to convey a specific message and reach a specific audience: the consumers. But, when talking about PSAs, many things changes: the KPIs for the assessment of their efficacy are no longer the commercial ones (GRP, reach etc.), but rather the gain obtained in public health after the airing of the campaign. Consequently, the specific message will be a different ‘call-to-action’: no more an invite to purchase, but rather to change a (wrong) social behaviour or adopt a (right) civil conscience. Given these premises, it is possible that marketing could be invested with a precise responsibility in terms of lives saved and public health. The practical and managerial implications of the research are the following: EU policymakers and local governments will have the opportunity to dispose of scientific data and information about the society that might be transformed in guidelines for producing effective PSAs based on the inner audience’s insights. The originality of this research resides in having framed the new neuromarketing protocols in the traditional Consumer Behaviour theory, combining thus future and past of the marketing research

The impact of exposure to violent music on undergraduate college males\u27 state anger, affective, physiological, and aggressive behavioral action responses

The current study addresses the potential negative impact of exposure to violent lyrical music on West Virginia University undergraduate college males\u27 state anger, affective, physiological and aggressive behavioral action responses. In addition, relationships between the following variables were also examined: (a) level of trait anger and aggressive behavioral action responses, (b) level of trait anger control and aggressive behavioral action responses, (c) level of trait anger expression and aggressive behavioral action responses, (d) overall anger expression index and aggressive behavioral action responses, (e) daily music listening and aggressive behavioral action responses, and (f) prior music exposure and aggressive behavioral action responses. Music preference influence on aggressive behavioral action responses was also explored. Parametric and nonparametric procedures were utilized to test the research questions. The results of the study revealed that college males exposed to violent lyrical music and subsequently provoked report more aggressive behavioral action responses compared to no music (control) participants. No significant difference in number of aggressive behavioral action responses were found between the violent lyrical and non-violent lyrical groups. Exposure to both violent lyrical and non-violent lyrical music did not impact participants level of state anger or positive and negative affective responses. A significant positive correlation between total number of aggressive behavioral action responses and trait anger was indicated for the violent lyrical participants. No significant between group differences in systolic (SBP) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP) and heart rate (HR) responses were found among the violent lyrical, non-violent lyrical and no music participants. Yet, upon comparing baseline SBP and post-music SBP, within group differences were revealed among both violent lyrical and non-violent lyrical participants. Clinical implications and limitations are discussed as well as suggestions for future research

Social competence: Cardiovascular activity and humor as mediating mechanisms.

The present study examined the impact of parent and child pain responsiveness, parent and child health, parent and child pain experience, and parenting style on the main outcome variable of social competence of preschool aged children. The conceptual model depicted direct effects of the first seven variables on the main outcome variable, child social competence, as well as indirect effects on child social competence via parenting style. Participants were recruited from 66 preschools operating in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia. A diverse sample of 242 parents, 220 mothers and 22 fathers, of preschool-aged children completed questionnaires measuring parent and child pain responsiveness, parent and child pain experience, parent and child health, parenting style and child social competence. In addition, the recruited child's preschool teacher completed a questionnaire rating the social competence of the child. Teacher rating questionnaires were completed for 184 children. The analytic process employed a preliminary series of correlational analyses to determine variables to include in model evaluations using parent and teacher rated child social competence as the principal outcome variables. The main analyses involved testing and refinement of the proposed model in a series of structural equation modeling (SEM). Because child social competence was measured using data from both parents and teachers, the modeling exercise was performed separately on each of the parent and teacher outcomes. Three variables from the originally hypothesized model, specifically child pain responsiveness, parent pain experience, and child health were not significantly correlated with the outcome variables. The tested model included parent pain experience, child pain experience, parent health, parenting style and child social competence for each of the parent and teacher models. In the parent model increased child social competence was predicted by decreased child pain experience, increased positive parenting style, and decreaThe original print copy of this thesis may be available here: http://wizard.unbc.ca/record=b165950

An examination of psychophysiological measures of sexual arousal

x, 176 leaves ; 29 cm.The scientific study of sex has developed significantly since the inception of psychophysiological methods to assess sexual arousal. Sexual psychophysiology involves assessing the physiological activation of the sexual response system, in addition to mental, behavioral, and emotional processes or experiences (Rosen & Beck, 1988). Measures of sexual arousal are reviewed in Chapter One. Chapter Two describes a study testing the validity of the most commonly used measure of genital arousal in women, vaginal photoplethysmography. Results indicate that vaginal photoplethysmography is sensitive to sexual arousal only, and that there are important sex differences in patterns of physiological arousal to sexual stimuli. Directions for future research are discussed