Electrical stimulation of midbrain tectum structures, particularly the dorsal periaqueductal gray (dPAG) and inferior colliculus (IC), produces defensive responses, such as freezing and escape behavior. Freezing also ensues after termination of dPAG stimulation (post-stimulation freezing). These defensive reaction responses are critically mediated by γ-aminobutyric acid and 5-hydroxytryptamine ...

OBJECTIVES Recent years have witnessed a progressive increase in defensive medicine (DM) in several Western welfare countries. In Danish primary and secondary care, documentation on the extent of DM is lacking. Before investigating the extent of DM, we wanted to explore how the phenomenon is understood and experienced in the context of general practice in Denmark. The objective of the study was...

Type 1 and 2 errors of courts deciding in medical malpractice trials a¤ect the physicians’provision of care. The paper at hand uses a principal-agent model to explain why uncertain liability prospects induce a welfare reducing separated equilibrium where altruistic physicians practice defensive medicine and sel…sh physicians act negligently. By minimizing the loss of welfare, it identi…es an op...

Evidence is presented supporting a dimension of defensive reactivity that varies across the anxiety disorder spectrum and is defined by physiological responses during threat-imagery challenges that covary with objective measures of psychopathology. Previous imagery studies of anxiety disorders are reviewed, highlighting that, regardless of contemporary diagnostic convention, reliable psychophys...

BACKGROUND Defensive medicine prompts physicians not to admit high-risk patients who need intensive care. This phenomenon not only decreases the quality of healthcare services, but also wastes scarce health resources. Defensive medicine occurs in negative and positive forms. Hence, the present study aimed to determine frequency of positive and negative defensive medicine behaviors and their und...

Drugs that are clinically effective against generalized anxiety disorder preferentially alter rodent risk assessment behavior, whereas drugs that are clinically effective against panic disorder preferentially alter rodent flight behavior. The theoretical principle of "defensive direction" explains the pattern of associations between emotion and defensive behavior in terms of the differing funct...

Machine learning is vulnerable to adversarial examples: inputs carefully modified to force misclassification. Designing defenses against such inputs remains largely an open problem. In this work, we revisit defensive distillation—which is one of the mechanisms proposed to mitigate adversarial examples—to address its limitations. We view our results not only as an effective way of addressing som...

This paper considers the transfer of digital data over leaky and noisy communication channels. We develop defensive strategies exploiting the fact that noise prevents the attacker from accurately measuring leakage. The defense strategy described in this paper pairs each useful data element k with a camouflage value v and simultaneously transmits both k and v over the channel. This releases an e...

In Italy in recent years, an exponential increase in the frequency of medical malpractice claims relating to the issue of informed consent has substantially altered not only medical ethics, but medical practice as well. Total or partial lack of consent has become the cornerstone of many malpractice lawsuits, and continues to be one of the primary cudgels against defendant physicians in Italian ...

Rodents display characteristic defense responses to predators that are influenced by predatory imminence. The midbrain periaqueductal gray (PAG) serves an important role controlling these responses. The most influential model states that variations in defensive topography are due to distinct PAG regions: ventrolateral PAG (VLPAG) controls postencounter defense, such as freezing and immobility, ...