The life-history trade-off between self-maintenance and reproduction posits that investment in one function decreases investment in the other. Manipulating the costs and benefits of functions involved in a trade-off may alter this interaction. Here we ask whether investment in self-maintenance during a stress response alters territorial behavior in wild Dark-eyed Juncos and whether rural and ur...

Health problems of the urban poor have been attributed to psychosocial effects of environmental stress. Testing such models requires an ability to measure neighborhood characteristics that make life stressful. The City Stress Inventory (CSI) uses self-report to assess perceived neighborhood disorder and exposure to violence. Data from an interracial sample of urban adolescents show the CSI to b...

Psychosocial stress is a contributing factor to cardiovascular disease. 1 An important way of investigating the mechanisms underlying this association is acute psycho-physiological stress testing, involving measurement of physiological responses to laboratory-induced stress. Psycho-physiological stress testing allows individual differences in responses to standardised stress to be evaluated and...

OBJECTIVE Evaluate the impact of stress on sugar cane cutters and the prevalence of physical and psychological symptoms before and after harvest. METHODS We studied 114 sugarcane cutters and 109 urban workers in the pre-harvest and 102 sugar cane cutters and 81 urban workers in the post-harvest period in the city of Mendonça, SP, Southeastern Brazil, in 2009. Data analysis was based on the fr...

—This paper reports on the results of an experiment designed to study fine grain physiological responses of participants to an immersive virtual simulation of an urban environment. An experiment was carried out with 40 participants who were asked to walk through a virtual street, which had virtual characters walking through it. The analysis of differences in participant responses at various sta...

BACKGROUND Stimulated by rapid modernization and industrialization, there is massive rural-urban migration in China. The migrants are highly susceptible to smoking and mental health problems. This study examined the association between both perceived work stress and perceived life stress with smoking behavior among this group during the period of migration. METHODS Participants (n = 1,595) we...

Cities in developing countries are facing serious problems as a result of rapid urban population growth. Not the least of these problems is the creation of environmental stresses at the rural-urban fringe of these cities as they increase in area and envelop fertile surrounding agricultural lands. Because of this rapid rate of growth, sustainable urban environmental management (SUEM) policies an...

Animals colonizing cities are exposed to many novel and potentially stressful situations. There is evidence that chronic stress can cause deleterious effects. Hence, wild animals would suffer from city life unless they adjusted their stress response to the conditions in a city. Here we show that European Blackbirds born in a city have a lower stress response than their forest conspecifics. We h...

The acute stress response involves the secretion of catabolic glucocorticoids, such as corticosterone (CORT) in birds, that mobilize intrinsic energy stores primarily through a gluconeogenic pathway involving fat breakdown, thus linking body condition and stress. We measured changes in CORT and gluconeogenic metabolites (triglycerides, free glycerols, glucose) during handling stress in curve-bi...