(Press-News.org) New York, NY, 17 February 2011 – Your emotional response to challenging situations could predict how your body responds to stress, according to research published this month in the journal Brain, Behavior, and Immunity.
"People who reported high levels of anger and anxiety after performing a laboratory-based stress task showed greater increases in a marker of inflammation, than those who remained relatively calm," said Dr Judith Carroll, who conducted the study at the University of Pittsburgh. "This could help explain why some people with high levels of stress experience chronic health problems," she added.
The investigators asked healthy middle-aged individuals to complete a speech in the laboratory in front of video camera and a panel of judges. During the speech, they monitored the physical responses to the task and then afterwards asked them about the emotions that they had experienced.
"Most people show increases in heart rate and blood pressure when they complete a stressful task," explained Dr Carroll, "but some also show increases in a circulating marker of inflammation known as interleukin-6. Our study shows that the people who have the biggest increases in this marker are the ones who show the greatest emotional responses to the task."
"Our results raise the possibility that individuals who become angry or anxious when confronting relatively minor challenges in their lives are prone to increases in inflammation," explained lead author Dr Anna Marsland, an Associate Professor of Psychology and Nursing at the University of Pittsburgh. "Over time, this may render these emotionally-reactive individuals more vulnerable to inflammatory diseases, such as cardiovascular disease," she said.
The research, funded by the National Institute of Nursing Research, is part of a burgeoning field, known as Psychoneuroimmunology, which investigates the interactions between psychological processes and health. "This paper addresses a key question in psychoneuroimmunology – what explains individual differences in the inflammatory response to stress," said Dr Margaret Kemeny, a Professor at the University of California, San Francisco. "These findings suggest that the specific nature of the emotional response to the task may be a key predictive factor and set the stage for future work defining these pathways and addressing their clinical implications," she added.
###
Notes to Editors:
The article is "Negative affective responses to a speech task predict changes in interleukin (IL)-6" by Judith E. Carroll, Carissa A. Low, Aric A. Prather, Sheldon Cohen, Jacqueline M. Fury, Diana C. Ross and Anna L. Marsland. Please see the article for the authors' affiliations and disclosures of financial and conflicts of interest. The article appears in Brain, Behavior, and Immunity, Volume 25, Number 2 (February 2011), published by Elsevier.
About Brain, Behavior, and Immunity
Brain, Behavior, and Immunity, founded in 1987, is the official journal of the Psychoneuroimmunology Research Society (PNIRS). This innovative journal publishes peer-reviewed basic, experimental, and clinical studies dealing with behavioral, neural, endocrine, and immune system interactions in humans and animals. It is an international, interdisciplinary journal devoted to investigation of the physiological systems that integrate behavioral and immunological responses. The journal welcomes original research in neuroscience, immunology, integrative physiology, behavioral biology, psychiatry, psychology, and clinical medicine and is inclusive of research at the molecular, cellular, social, and organismic levels. The journal features online submission and review, leading to timely publication of experimental results. There are no submission fees or page charges for Brain, Behavior, and Immunity, which is published eight times a year.
About Elsevier
Elsevier is a world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services. The company works in partnership with the global science and health communities to publish more than 2,000 journals, including The Lancet and Cell, and close to 20,000 book titles, including major reference works from Mosby and Saunders. Elsevier's online solutions include SciVerse ScienceDirect, SciVerse Scopus, Reaxys, MD Consult and Nursing Consult, which enhance the productivity of science and health professionals, and the SciVal suite and MEDai's Pinpoint Review, which help research and health care institutions deliver better outcomes more cost-effectively.
A global business headquartered in Amsterdam, Elsevier employs 7,000 people worldwide. The company is part of Reed Elsevier Group PLC, a world-leading publisher and information provider, which is jointly owned by Reed Elsevier PLC and Reed Elsevier NV. The ticker symbols are REN (Euronext Amsterdam), REL (London Stock Exchange), RUK and ENL (New York Stock Exchange).
END
A study conducted at the University of Granada and at the University Hospital San Cecilio revealed that preterm mothers' milk contains low concentrations of coenzyme Q10. This is a complex of great medical importance, due both to its antioxidant capacity and to its role as a component of the electron transport chain, among other functions.
This study counted with the participation of a group of researchers of the Institute of Nutrition and Food Technology "José Mataix" (from to the Andalusian Government research groups AGR-145 and CTS-627), and with the collaboration ...
Children with chronic health conditions are 88% more likely to suffer physical abuse than healthy children, according to research in the March issue of Acta Paediatrica. They are also 154% more likely to suffer a combination of physical abuse and exposure to intimate partner violence than their healthy school friends.
Researchers from Karlstad University, Sweden, analysed 2,510 questionnaires completed anonymously by children aged ten, 12 and 15 from 44 schools. Nearly one in four had at least one chronic health condition, including visual, hearing or speech problems, ...
The team of Professor Burkhard Luy from KIT and Junior Professor Stefan F. Kirsch from the TUM has now shown for the first time that certain NMR parameters, the so-called residual dipolar couplings (RDCs), can make a significant contribution towards determining the constitution of chemical compounds when traditional methods fail. To do this they embedded molecules of the compound in a gel which slightly constricts their mobility. By stretching the gel, the molecules can be aligned along a preferred orientation. While residual dipolar couplings average out in solution, they ...
Depending on the level of smoking and leisure time exercise, vitamin E supplementation may decrease or increase, or may have no effect, on the risk of pneumonia, according to a study published in Clinical Epidemiology.
In laboratory studies, vitamin E has influenced the immune system. In several animal studies vitamin E protected against viral and bacterial infections. However, the importance of vitamin E on human infections is not known.
Dr. Harri Hemila and Professor Jaakko Kaprio, of the University of Helsinki, Finland, studied the effect of vitamin E on the risk ...
CHICAGO—Afraid of becoming disabled in old age, not being able to dress yourself or walk up and down the stairs? Staying physically active before symptoms set in could help. But so could going out to eat, playing bingo and taking overnight trips.
According to research conducted at Rush University Medical Center, higher levels of social activity are associated with a decreased risk of becoming disabled. The study has just been posted online and will be published in the April issue of the Journal of Gerontology: Medical Sciences.
"Social activity has long been recognized ...
Feb. 17, 2011– A new treatment approach which uses tiny bursts of electricity to reawaken paralyzed muscles "significantly" reduced disability and improved grasping in people with incomplete spinal cord injuries, beyond the effects of standard therapy, newly published research shows.
In a study published online in the journal Neurorehabilitation and Neural Repair, Toronto researchers report that functional electrical stimulation (FES) therapy worked better than conventional occupational therapy alone to increase patients' ability to pick up and hold objects.
FES therapy ...
WASHINGTON – Lifestyle changes—such as getting more exercise, time in nature, or helping others—can be as effective as drugs or counseling to treat an array of mental illnesses, according to a new paper published by the American Psychological Association.
Multiple mental health conditions, including depression and anxiety, can be treated with certain lifestyle changes as successfully as diseases such as diabetes and obesity, according to Roger Walsh, M.D., PhD. of the University of California, Irvine's College of Medicine. Walsh reviewed research on the effects of what ...
VIDEO:
Although, in the majority of cases, the localized presence of Neisseria meningitidis in the throat has no consequence, it can sometimes lead to meningitis or septicaemia. The seriousness of these...
Click here for more information.
Although, in the majority of cases, the localized presence of Neisseria meningitidis in the throat has no consequence, it can sometimes lead to meningitis or septicaemia. The seriousness of these two infections is driving researchers from ...
Young children living in urban public housing spend more time playing outdoors than other urban children, according to researchers at Rice University, Columbia University and Princeton University.
Contrary to the expectations of the researchers, who hypothesized that children living in poorer circumstances would be playing outside less, the study found that 5-year-olds living in public housing played outside 13 percent more per day, on average, than did other urban 5-year-olds. Children living in places of high physical disorder -- areas with visible graffiti, trash, ...
The research could eventually lead to new approaches for controlling sleeping sickness in humans and wasting diseases in livestock which are caused by trypanosomes carried by the bloodsucking tsetse fly.
Biologists believe that sexual reproduction evolved very early and is now ubiquitous in organisms with complex cell structure (the eukaryotes, essentially all living organisms except bacteria). However, real evidence is lacking for a large section of the evolutionary tree.
Trypanosomes represent an early and very distant branch of the eukaryote tree of life and ...
