Empathy is a fundamental attribute required for appropriate social functioning. The extent to which we empathize with others in pain is influenced by numerous factors. Being highly social species, humans face social stress on a regular basis, which undoubtedly affects how we react to our environment. It is not yet known how social stress may modulate our neural mechanisms when we empathize with...

Omega-3 fatty acids found in fish oil have been suggested to protect against cardiovascular disease, yet underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Despite the well-documented link between mental stress and cardiovascular risk, no study has examined neural cardiovascular reactivity to mental stress after fish oil supplementation. We hypothesized that fish oil would blunt the blood pressure, heart ra...

This study examined nonuniform postganglionic cardiac sympathetic neural discharge as a possible mechanism involved in the production of coronary occlusion or ouabain-induced arrhythmias. After acute occlusion of the left anterior descending coronary artery in 12 cats, anesthetized with alpha-chloralose and pretreated with atropine, arrhythmia occurred within 3 min in eight animals; three of th...

Background & Objective: Stress contributes to sleep-wake behavior in all animals. It seems that factors such as learning and memory processes can improve sleep disorders. Therefore, the present study was conducted to determine the effects of stress and learning (spatial memory) on total post-stress rapid-eye-movement (REM), non-rapid-eye-movement (NREM) and waking time in rats. Materials & Met...

The goal of this work is to introduce an architecture to automatically detect the amount of stress in the speech signal close to real time. For this an experimental setup to record speech rich in vocabulary and containing different stress levels is presented. Additionally, an experiment explaining the labeling process with a thorough analysis of the labeled data is presented. Fifteen subjects w...

healthcare workers suffer from work-related or occupational stress. this can lead to severe distress, burnout or physical illness, and finally to decrease quality of work life and services provision. nurses must be aware of retential stressors, because they add to the cumulative effect of other stressful events. holmes and rahe both found a relationship between life change unit as stressors and...

Various methods for automatic change detection in multi-temporal LANDSAT-TM images are described. In contrast to most previous work in change detection, which has operated at a pixel level, we operate at a parcel level (within a minimum size of 25 Ha). This makes it easier to employ structural measures (e.g. based on edges, corners, and texture) as well as correlation methods since these approa...