Sympathetic arousal to a vestibular stressor in high and low hostile men

The aim of the present experiment was to extend the literature on hostility and a cerebral systems based model of sympathetic arousal to a vestibular-based stress. Several authors have concluded that autonomic stress reactivity in high hostile individuals must be interpersonally based, whereas healthy vestibular system functioning does not depend on interpersonal features. Utilizing a vestibular activation paradigm, skin conductance levels of 15 high hostile and 15 low hostile men were recorded after brief passive rotation about the vertical neuroaxis. It was expected that hostile individuals would exhibit higher skin conductance levels after rotation compared with low hostile individuals. The results confirmed expectations of heightened sympathetic tone among high hostiles subsequent to vestibular stress. Overall, the findings are interpreted to support a cerebral model of frontal region capacity limitation for regulation of vestibular stress that is independent of psychosocial mechanisms.     

Violent computer games and their effects on state hostility and physiological arousal

An experimental study was conducted to investigate the impact of violent computer games on state hostility, state anxiety and arousal. Participants were undergraduate students, aged from 18 to 25 years. Before the experimental sessions, participants filled in self‐report measures concerning their video game habits and were also pre‐tested for aggressiveness and trait anxiety. Physiological responses (heart rate and skin conductance) were measured during the experiment. After playing, information about state hostility and state anxiety was collected. The results showed that participants who played the violent game reported significantly higher state hostility, and support the assumption that an aggressive personality moderates the effect of playing a violent game on state hostility. Aggr. Behav. 32:146–158. 2006 © 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

Violent computer games and their effects on state hostility and Physiological arousal

An experimental study was conducted to investigate the impact of violent computer games on state hostility, state anxiety and arousal. Participants were undergraduate students, aged from 18 to 25 years old. Before the experimental sessions, participants filled in self‐report measures concerning their video game habits and were also pre‐tested for aggressiveness and trait anxiety. Physiological responses (heart rate and skin conductance) were measured during the experiment. After playing, information about state hostility and state anxiety was collected. The results showed that participants who played the violent game reported significantly higher state hostility and support the assumption that an aggressive personality moderates the effect of playing a violent game on state hostility. Aggr. Behav. 32:358–371. 2006. © 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

Ego depletion by response exaggeration

Suppressing or inhibiting responses has a host of negative effects, including a temporary reduction in self-regulatory strength (ego depletion). Less attention has been given to response exaggeration, which should also deplete regulatory strength and therefore disrupt subsequent self-control. We tested the depletion hypothesis by having participants perform tests of cognitive fluency after exaggerating responses (or not) to a disgusting film clip. Response exaggeration produced increased emotional expression but did not increase subjective emotional experience. Moreover, exaggerating disgust reactions impaired subsequent performance on tests of cognitive fluency. The cognitive aftereffects of exaggeration were not attributable to emotional experience or to changes in sympathetic or parasympathetic arousal (as indicated by skin conductance and heart rate variability high frequency power, respectively). Poorer cognitive fluency after response exaggeration indicates a detrimental effect of purposeful self-regulation.     

The effects of task-irrelevant threatening stimuli on orienting- and executive attentional processes under cognitive load

Human visual attention is biased to rapidly detect threats in the environment so that our nervous system can initiate quick reactions. The processes underlying threat detection (and how they operate under cognitive load), however, are still poorly understood. Thus, we sought to test the impact of task-irrelevant threatening stimuli on the salience network and executive control of attention during low and high cognitive load. Participants were exposed to neutral or threatening pictures (with moderate and high arousal levels) as task-irrelevant distractors in near (parafoveal) and far (peripheral) positions while searching for numbers in ascending order in a matrix array. We measured reaction times and recorded eye-movements. Our results showed that task-irrelevant distractors primarily influenced behavioural measures during high cognitive load. The distracting effect of threatening images with moderate arousal level slowed reaction times for finding the first number. However, this slowing was offset by high arousal threatening stimuli, leading to overall shorter search times. Eye-tracking measures showed that participants fixated threatening pictures more later and for shorter durations compared to neutral images. Together, our results indicate a complex relationship between threats and attention that results not in a unitary bias but in a sequence of effects that unfold over time.     

Preliminary evidence that acute and chronic daily psychological stress affect sexual arousal in sexually functional women

It is assumed that psychological stress may inhibit sexual arousal in women. Research on the effect of (acute and chronic) psychological stressors on genital and subjective sexual arousal, however, is scarce. To investigate whether psychological stressors indeed inhibit sexual responding, sexually functional women were randomly assigned to an experimental condition (n=30) in which acute psychological stress was induced by a frustrating computer task or a control condition (n=29). After the acute psychological stress or control induction women were exposed to an erotic stimulus. Genital sexual arousal was assessed using vaginal photoplethysmography. Self-report ratings of subjective sexual arousal were collected after the erotic stimulus. Furthermore, women were post hoc divided into a 'low' and a 'high' chronic stress group, based on their pre-assessment scores on a chronic daily stress questionnaire. As predicted, it was found that women in the acute stress condition responded with lower levels of genital and subjective sexual arousal to an erotic stimulus than women in the control condition. In addition, women with high levels of chronic stress responded with lower levels of genital sexual arousal to an erotic stimulus than women with low levels of chronic stress. Chronic stress did not affect the level of subjective sexual arousal.     

Specificity of autonomic arousal to DSM-IV panic disorder and posttraumatic stress disorder

Although research on the hierarchical model of anxiety and depression has confirmed that autonomic arousability (AA) is more germane to panic disorder with or without agoraphobia (PD/A) than other DSM-IV anxiety and mood disorders, studies have not evaluated the differential relevance of AA to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This issue was addressed in multivariate analytic models using 295 outpatients with anxiety and mood disorders. Consistent with prediction, the presence of current DSM-IV PTSD and PD/A was significantly predictive of AA, even when other forms of anxiety disorder comorbidity were held constant. Moreover, latent structural analyses indicated that PTSD and PD/A were the only DSM-IV anxiety disorder constructs to have significant direct effects on AA (in accord with previous findings, the DSM-IV constructs of generalized anxiety disorder, social phobia, and obsessive-compulsive disorder did not have significant structural relationships with AA). The current findings, which attest to the specificity of AA to PTSD and PD/A, are discussed in context of other clinically salient shared features of these disorders and their relevance to treatment and diagnostic classification.     

Heart-rate deceleration and smiling in 3-month-old infants

The relation between heart-rate deceleration and the expression of positive affect in infancy is examined by testing the hypothesis that intensity of orienting (as indexed by heart-rate deceleration) is predictive of intensity of positive affect (smile size and duration). A social-stimulation procedure was utilized to elicit smiles in 41 3-month-old infants. The first smile elicited was coded for smile size and duration, and the preceding heart-rate deceleration was coded for magnitude, duration, and slope of deceleration. Slope and duration of heart-rate deceleration proved to be reliable predictors of smile size, but none of the heart-rate measures correlated with smile duration. Results suggest that the steeper and more rapid the deceleration, the larger the ensuing smile. Possible mechanisms for this finding are discussed.     

Sensitivity to aversive events in depression: Antecedent,concomitant, or consequent?

This study tested whether sensitivity to aversive events is a concomitant versus antecedent/consequent of depression. Twenty currently depressed subjects, twenty subjects with remitted depression, and twenty control subjects completed psychophysiological and learning tasks involving aversive components. Both currently depressed and remitted subjects, when compared to control subjects, exhibited greater decreases in skin resistance response reactions to negative social scenes and a greater sensitivity to extinction in the learning condition involving an aversive component. The fact that the responses of remitted subjects were very similar to those of currently depressed subjects on both tasks is consistent with the view that sensitivity to aversive events is an antecedent or consequent of depression, as opposed to being only a concomitant. The results also provide some support for the passive avoidance model of depression.This study was based on portions of a doctoral dissertation by the first author, with the second author as chairperson, at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.This research was aided by a Grant-in-Aid of Research to the first author from Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society, an award from the Jill Shelby Memorial Fund to the first author, and support from National Institute of Mental Health Grant MH17071, awarded to C. R. Snyder.Portions of this paper were presented at the meeting of the American Psychological Association, New Orleans, August 1989, and at the meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Behavior Therapy, Washington, DC, November, 1989.     

Sports participation at work: An aid to stress management?

This study examined the effects of sport participation on mood, including stress, arousal, and psychological reversals. The subjects (N = 42) of the study were enrolled in an international MBA program which included, in addition to a range of academic courses, a course in physical education for which attendance was voluntary. Subjects, 26 sport participants and 16 nonparticipants, completed mood measures on five occasions throughout a typical working day, including just before and just after a sport session. Significant differences on some mood measure items and a number of pre- to post-sport significant effects (seriousmindedness and stress) were found between the sport and non-sport group, as well as reversals in psychological state. These results suggest that sport may well act as a modulator of mood and/or an inducing agent for reversal and therefore may play an important role in stress management intervention programs at work.