Although epidemiological research has shown an increase in drinking following stressors and trauma, limited paradigms have been validated to study the relationship between stress and drinking in the human laboratory. The current study developed a progressive ratio (PR) operant procedure to examine the effects of psychosocial stress on alcohol craving and several alcohol-motivated behaviors in p...

Social stressors that rely on the inclusion of confederates (i.e., Trier Social Stress Test, TSST) are often used in clinical laboratory research paradigms to elicit a measurable stress response in participants. Although effective, the TSST is labor intensive and may introduce error variance as a function of confederate race, gender, and/or response characteristics. The present study aimed to d...

OBJECTIVE This study aimed to (1) See whether increased or decreased variation relate to subjective reports of common somatic and psychological symptoms for a population on long-term sick leave; and (2) See if this pattern in variation is correlated with autonomic activation and psychological appraisal. METHODS Our participants (n = 87) were referred to a 3.5-week return-to-work rehabilitatio...

Stress remains a significant social problem for individuals in modern societies. This paper presents a machine learning approach for the automatic detection of stress of people in a social situation by combining two sensor systems that capture physiological and social responses. We compare the performance using different classifiers including support vector machine, AdaBoost, and [Formula: see ...

Studies report that urticarial dermographism is exacerbated by "life events" and emotions. The aim of this study was to determine what aspects of life quality are affected by symptomatic dermographism and whether acute stress is a potential triggering factor. A total of 21 adult patients with urticarial dermographism completed a questionnaire on symptoms and quality of life. Twelve patients agr...

Validated biological and psychological markers of acute stress in humans are an important tool in translational research. The Trier Social Stress Test (TSST), involving public interview and mental arithmetic performance, is among the most popular methods of inducing acute stress in experimental settings, and reliably increases hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis activation. However, although mu...