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Biomedical subjects

P D Tyson

Publications and source records attributed to P D Tyson.

12 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2000

When nurses cry: coping with occupational stress in Thailand.

Anecdotal reports of people feeling better after they cry support theories that link crying to the reduction of stress after a period of prolonged sympathetic activation. A sample of 200 nurses were asked to rate their occupational stress, job satisfaction, and crying as a coping strategy. Crying was found to be an important symptom of home/work conflicts and pressures related to dealing with patients, but did not substantially reduce these sources of stress. Supporting the stress-buffering hypothesis, nurses with lower intrinsic job satisfaction seemed to benefit from emotional crying whereas dissatisfied nurses who cry infrequently reported the highest levels of stress.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed1996

Biodesensitization: biofeedback-controlled systematic desensitization of the stress response to infant crying.

Infant crying can be a source of parental stress both psychologically and physiologically and also may be an antecedent to physical child abuse or neglect. Biodesensitization is a new therapeutic technique that allows people to control the source of stress and develop self-control over their physiological responses to the stress-eliciting stimuli. Randomly assigned between three groups, 15 female participants were either given EEG biofeedback pretraining without stress, pretraining while listening to infant crying, or no stress management pretraining while listening to crying. After the pretraining manipulation all participants had biodesensitization training while listening to infant crying. Compared to control participants who were habituated to crying, stress management training significantly reduced the EEG cortical arousal as well as perceived arousal, and anxiety associated with listening to infant crying. The shift in participants' EEG power spectrum produced by infant crying was significantly correlated with perceived arousal and this relationship was strengthened after biofeedback training. In conjunction with other research, the experimental results suggest that stress management training may help ameliorate an aversive response to infant crying and possibly prevent child abuse as a response to physiological hyperreactivity.

Adult↗
PubMed1996

Avoidance as a coping strategy for nurses in Thailand.

Multiple regression analyses indicated a significant relationship between the coping, strategy of avoidance job satisfaction, and occupational stress. Although, it was the best predictor of stress compared to problem solving, social support, and relaxation, avoidance did not have an interactive buffering effect on occupational stress for 200 Thai nurses.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed1994

Memory enhancement after drinking ethanol: consolidation, interference, or response bias?

One explanation for memory facilitation is that alcohol has a short-term neurochemical stimulating effect on consolidating neural networks when material is learned before drinking. Contrary to the consolidation hypothesis, when the consolidation interval was manipulated the results showed that the effects of alcohol were not time dependent. Compared to placebo subjects, alcohol significantly facilitated the recall of 25 words whether administered immediately or 40 min after learning. In addition, alcohol significantly increased the memory of words associated with pictures when incidentally learned before drinking and significantly decreased incidental learning after drinking. Another explanation for memory facilitation is that alcohol's depressive physiological effect impairs the acquisition of new information, like sleeping after learning, and enhances memory by reducing subsequent interference. Consistent with the retroactive interference hypothesis, the effects of alcohol reduced interpolated interference, were greater on recall than recognition, and were immune to time delays. Contemporary theories view memory enhancement attributed to alcohol as indirectly influencing response biases and contextual cues associated with retrieval from episodic memory.

Adult↗
PubMed1994

Perceptual responses to infant crying after EEG biofeedback assisted stress management training: implications for physical child abuse.

The adult's perception of infant crying determines whether it is a source of stress and may be an antecedent to physical child abuse. The study had clients listen to infant crying and used stress management training to change their perceived arousal, anxiety, and evaluation of the crying. Fifteen nonparental female clients were randomly assigned to three groups who either had pretraining without stress, pretraining while listening to infant crying, or listened to yoked infant crying without pretraining. During the second stage all clients had stress management training while listening to infant crying. The clients' perceived anxiety and arousal elicited by crying were significantly diminished after stress management training and anxiety measures were strongly correlated with both perceived arousal and the clients' evaluation of infant crying. Although this is the first experiment applying biofeedback assisted stress management training to the perceptual responses and physiological arousal associated with infant crying, these results with inexperienced clients have implications for the prevention and treatment of parental stress and should encourage further research treating physical child abuse as a stress-related disorder.

Adult↗
PubMed1988

Memory deficits in psychiatric outpatients and affective ratings of positive and neutral lists of words.

The experimental findings on memory deficits from hospitalized psychiatric patients were applied to the recall and recognition memory of outpatients. Two positive and one list of 25 neutral words each were learned by the subjects for recognition and then rated as an orienting task during rehearsal for recall. On the first positive list, compared to 20 controls, the 7 patients showed substantial recall deficits, but recognition memory and affective ratings were relatively normal. On the subsequent positive list, outpatients' recall memory declined and did not recover after shifting to neutral words on the third list. There was little evidence for the build-up of interference, instead factors such as fatigue may affect patients' recall memory. Recognition memory showed signs of interference contributing to the patients' deficits. Psychiatric outpatients have significant recall deficits, less severe recognition deficits, and attitude problems that may contribute to the high rate of readmissions.

Adult↗
PubMed1987

Task-related stress and EEG alpha biofeedback.

Establishing a contingency between stress and a physiological response is essential in biofeedback. The sensitivity of high alpha to contingent stress was investigated by manipulating conditions known to influence stress, such as the distribution, predictability, and controllability of stressful stimuli, and number of tasks performed. Forty subjects were divided into stress and non-stress groups. Within each group, one-half had the dual-task of anticipating and increasing alpha activity. The other half was initially instructed to only anticipate alpha and, later, had the dual task of anticipating and controlling alpha. No feedback training was included to distribute the task-related stressor and allowed the assessment of self-control. All of the stress manipulations significantly influenced the effects of stress on alpha production. The dual-task subjects produced less alpha and less self-control than did training with control phased in after subjects learned to anticipate alpha. Without stress, phased-in control produced highly significant increases in alpha production and self-control without feedback. The use of an alpha-contingent feedback paradigm and anticipation training was related to the therapeutic applications of alpha feedback to stress and anxiety.

Alpha Rhythm↗
PubMed1982

Lucid dreaming and alpha activity: a preliminary report.

10 good dream recallers spent 2 nights in the sleep lab during which they were awakened 4 times per night from REM sleep, twice during their highest alpha activity in REM, and twice during low REM alpha. 5 were given alpha feedback training prior to sleep onset. Arousals from high alpha REM sleep yielded significantly higher lucidity ratings. Alpha feedback had no effect upon lucidity or REM alpha levels. Similarities between lucid dreams and meditative phenomena are discussed.

Adult↗
PubMed1976

Perceptual compensations for the effects of alcohol.

When confronted with conflicting spatial information from their visual-auditory systems, subjects compensated for the effects of alcohol by attenuating visual information when locating the source of a sound.

Adolescent↗