STUDY OBJECTIVES Arousal intensity and heart rate (HR) response to arousal during polysomnography (PSG) vary considerably between patients with sleep disorders. Our objective was to determine the range of these arousal characteristics in healthy young adults and whether they are consistent on repeated testing. DESIGN Post hoc analysis of 56 preexisting PSG files recorded from 28 healthy adult...

Arousal reflects a state of generalised physiological activation, and its key role in cognition and behaviour has been extensively described. The regulation of arousal is controlled by specific nuclei located in the brainstem that contain widely distributed projections to the cortex and form the arousal systems. In humans, arousal has been commonly studied and modulated through behavioural para...

AROUSAL FROM SLEEP IS CONSIDERED ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT PROTECTIVE RESPONSES TO ADVERSE RESPIRATORY EVENTS SUCH AS OBSTRUCTIVE apnoea.1 Arousal produces intense cardiovascular and respiratory activation that rapidly reverses blood-gas disturbance associated with airway obstruction and likely promotes physiologic preparedness for subsequent “fight-or-flight” survival responses. In healthy ind...

Most studies on physiological effects of emotion-inducing images and sounds examine stimulus locked variables reflecting a state of at most a few seconds. We here aimed to induce longer lasting emotional states using blocks of repetitive visual, auditory, and bimodal stimuli corresponding to specific valence and arousal levels. The duration of these blocks enabled us to reliably measure heart r...

We performed a broadscale screening of differential gene expression using both high-throughput bead-array technology and real-time PCR assay in brown adipose tissue, liver, heart, hypothalamus, and skeletal muscle in hibernating arctic ground squirrels, comparing animals sampled after two durations of steady-state torpor, during two stages of spontaneous arousal episodes, and in animals after t...

STUDY OBJECTIVES Brief arousals have been systematically scored during sleep for more than 20 years. Despite significant knowledge concerning the importance of arousals for the sleep process in normal subjects and patients, comprehensive age norms have not been published. METHODS Seventy-six normal subjects (40 men) without sleep apnea or periodic limb movements of sleep, aged 18 to 70 years,...

The relationship between noise and human performance is a crucial topic in ergonomic research. However, the brain dynamics of the emotional arousal effects of background noises are still unclear. The current study employed meaningless speech noises in the n-back working memory task to explore the changes of event-related potentials (ERPs) elicited by the noises with low arousal level vs. high a...

Intraindividual variability is an often understudied aspect of health outcomes research that may provide additional, complementary information to average values. The current paper aims to further our understanding of intraindividual variability in health research by presenting the results of a daily diary study of sleep and pre-sleep arousal. Pre-sleep arousal is often implicated in poor sleep ...

Sexual arousal is category-specific in men; heterosexual men are more aroused by female than by male sexual stimuli, whereas homosexual men show the opposite pattern. There is reason to believe that female sexual arousal is organized differently. We assessed genital and subjective sexual arousal to male and female sexual stimuli in women, men, and postoperative male-to-female transsexuals. In c...

Individuals who perform poorly on measures of the executive function of inhibition have higher anxious arousal in comparison to those with better performance. High anxious arousal is associated with a pro-inflammatory response. Chronically high anxious arousal and inflammation increase one's risk of developing type 2 diabetes. We sought to evaluate anxious arousal and inflammation as underlying...