Allostasis, Homeostasis, and the Costs of Physiological Adaptation

Sarah Coste reviews Allostasis, Homeostasis, and the Costs of Physiological Adaptation (edited by Jay Schulkin) for the Quarterly Review of Biology

Modelling Adaptation through Social Allostasis: Modulating the Effects of Social Touch with Oxytocin in Embodied Agents

Social allostasis is a mechanism of adaptation that permits individuals to dynamically adapt their physiology to changing physical and social conditions. Oxytocin (OT) is widely considered to be one of the hormones that drives and adapts social behaviours. While its precise effects remain unclear, two areas where OT may promote adaptation are by affecting social salience, and affecting internal responses of performing social behaviours. Working towards a model of dynamic adaptation through social allostasis in simulated embodied agents, and extending our previous work studying OT-inspired modulation of social salience, we present a model and experiments that investigate the effects and adaptive value of allostatic processes based on hormonal (OT) modulation of affective elements of a social behaviour. In particular, we investigate and test the effects and adaptive value of modulating the degree of satisfaction of tactile contact in a social motivation context in a small simulated agent society across different environmental challenges (related to availability of food) and effects of OT modulation of social salience as a motivational incentive. Our results show that the effects of these modulatory mechanisms have different (positive or negative) adaptive value across different groups and under different environmental circumstance in a way that supports the context-dependent nature of OT, put forward by the interactionist approach to OT modulation in biological agents. In terms of simulation models, this means that OT modulation of the mechanisms that we have described should be context-dependent in order to maximise viability of our socially adaptive agents, illustrating the relevance of social allostasis mechanisms.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Allostatic load and preterm birth

Preterm birth is a universal health problem that is one of the largest unmet medical needs contributing to the global burden of disease. Adding to its complexity is that there are no means to predict who is at risk when pregnancy begins or when women will actually deliver. Until these problems are addressed, there will be no interventions to reduce the risk because those who should be treated will not be known. Considerable evidence now exists that chronic life, generational or accumulated stress is a risk factor for preterm delivery in animal models and in women. This wear and tear on the body and mind is called allostatic load. This review explores the evidence that chronic stress contributes to preterm birth and other adverse pregnancy outcomes in animal and human studies. It explores how allostatic load can be used to, firstly, model stress and preterm birth in animal models and, secondly, how it can be used to develop a predictive model to assess relative risk among women in early pregnancy. Once care providers know who is in the highest risk group, interventions can be developed and applied to mitigate their risk

Homeostasis as the Mechanism of Evolution.

Homeostasis is conventionally thought of merely as a synchronic (same time) servo-mechanism that maintains the status quo for organismal physiology. However, when seen from the perspective of developmental physiology, homeostasis is a robust, dynamic, intergenerational, diachronic (across-time) mechanism for the maintenance, perpetuation and modification of physiologic structure and function. The integral relationships generated by cell-cell signaling for the mechanisms of embryogenesis, physiology and repair provide the needed insight to the scale-free universality of the homeostatic principle, offering a novel opportunity for a Systems approach to Biology. Starting with the inception of life itself, with the advent of reproduction during meiosis and mitosis, moving forward both ontogenetically and phylogenetically through the evolutionary steps involved in adaptation to an ever-changing environment, Biology and Evolution Theory need no longer default to teleology

Allostasis and organizational excellence

Organizational excellence is critical towards the development of organizations and, considering organizations’ role in the modern world, for societies’ economic and social development. The ability of organizations to adapt and adjust to the contingencies of the change and recover the stability of organizational systems through organizations’ own dynamic process is known as allostasis. This research focuses on the relationship between allostasis and organizational excellence. Based on a sample of 205 firms from Portugal and Spain, and resorting to fuzzy-set QCA (fsQCA), this research reveals that there are different combinations (equifinality) of conditions inherent to allostasis (adaptive capacity, feedback capacity, stigmergy capacity and integration intensity) leading to sustainable high outcomes (employee satisfaction, stakeholder satisfaction and organizational performance, jointly selected as proxies for organizational excellence). The analysis also shows that organizations that match those combinations simultaneously achieve high employee satisfaction, stakeholder satisfaction and organizational performance (multifinality), which is aligned with the premises of organizational excellence. Finally, the results reveal that in the different contexts (countries) analyzed, the combinations leading to high outcomes differ, thus supporting the idea that the ability to adapt and adjust that characterizes allostasis is critical towards organizational excellence.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

What Emotions Really Are (In the Theory of Constructed Emotion)

Recently, Lisa Feldman Barrett and colleagues have introduced the Theory of Constructed Emotions (TCE), in which emotions are constituted by a process of categorizing the self as being in an emotional state. The view, however, has several counterintuitive implications: for instance, a person can have multiple distinct emotions at once. Further, the TCE concludes that emotions are constitutively social phenomena. In this article, I explicate the TCE*, which, while substantially similar to the TCE, makes several distinct claims aimed at avoiding the counterintuitive implications plaguing the TCE. Further, because of the changes that comprise the TCE*, emotions are not constitutively social phenomena

Variation in adrenal and thyroid hormones with life-history stage in juvenile northern elephant seals (Mirounga angustirostris)

Interpretation of stress responses in wildlife is inadequate due to the range of natural variation and potential confounds of individual and life-history variables. In marine mammals, endocrine response data are sparse and variable across species. Blood adrenal and thyroid hormones were measured in 144 chemically immobilized yearling elephant seals at Año Nuevo State Reserve to characterize variation between sexes and across semiannual haul-outs. There was no relationship between hormone concentration and time needed for collecting blood or diel pattern, suggesting that concentrations represented baseline values. Serum cortisol concentrations did not vary with gender or across fasts but increased dramatically during molting. Cortisol was significantly correlated with aldosterone at all measured life-history. Thyroxine levels were lower in females and decreased with fasting in both sexes during the Fall haul-out. Cortisol concentrations were correlated with reverse T3 concentrations across all measured life-history stages suggesting an important impact of cortisol on deiodinase enzymes and thyroid function. Significant variation in stress hormone concentrations with gender and life- history stage emphasizes the importance of contextual variables when interpreting serum hormone concentrations

Stress: Putting the Brain Back Into Medicine

Throughout the life course stress plays a major role in health and disease. Although it has long been known that the brain orchestrates the many ways that the body responds to these experiences, a gap exists between health care providers who focus from the head up and those who focus on the head down

Practopoiesis: Or how life fosters a mind

The mind is a biological phenomenon. Thus, biological principles of organization should also be the principles underlying mental operations. Practopoiesis states that the key for achieving intelligence through adaptation is an arrangement in which mechanisms laying a lower level of organization, by their operations and interaction with the environment, enable creation of mechanisms lying at a higher level of organization. When such an organizational advance of a system occurs, it is called a traverse. A case of traverse is when plasticity mechanisms (at a lower level of organization), by their operations, create a neural network anatomy (at a higher level of organization). Another case is the actual production of behavior by that network, whereby the mechanisms of neuronal activity operate to create motor actions. Practopoietic theory explains why the adaptability of a system increases with each increase in the number of traverses. With a larger number of traverses, a system can be relatively small and yet, produce a higher degree of adaptive/intelligent behavior than a system with a lower number of traverses. The present analyses indicate that the two well-known traverses-neural plasticity and neural activity-are not sufficient to explain human mental capabilities. At least one additional traverse is needed, which is named anapoiesis for its contribution in reconstructing knowledge e.g., from long-term memory into working memory. The conclusions bear implications for brain theory, the mind-body explanatory gap, and developments of artificial intelligence technologies.Comment: Revised version in response to reviewer comment