Monday, April 23, 2007

Emotions and Health

This week’s readings addressed how social and cultural meanings interact with physiology and effect health.

The Neurobiological Bases of Individual Differences in Emotional and Stress Responsiveness tried to understand how the neurochemical substrates of stress effect behavior and temperament in rats. Rats were characterized as either high locomotor response (HR) or low locomotor response (LR) based on their behavior when encountering a novel environment. HR rats generally display more curiosity in new environments and are more likely to self administer drugs than LR. Although HR rats appear less anxious in new situations, they actually release high levels of glucocortocoids during these times. I wondered how the levels of glucocortocoids differed between the HR and LR rats, since it wasn’t made clear in the paper. Interestingly, after being socially isolated for a week HR rats behaved like LR rats in anxiety experiments, illustrating the profound effect of social support on stressful experiences. In general, I was very confused about the role of glucocortocoids in the differences in anxious behavior between the LR and HR. Do glucocortocoids directly regulate anxious behavior?

Socioeconomic Status and Health: The Challenge of the Gradient presented a correlation between socioeconomic status and health. Socioeconomic satus influences nearly every aspect of life, including physical and social environment, education, and health behaviors, which, in turn, affect the biological functions that determine health. Adler et al. also note that the SES gradient is highly correlated with the amount of psychological stress in an individual’s life. Individuals of lower socioeconomic status tend to have greater exposure to more negative experiences and also have less access to coping resources, and are therefore more susceptible to the subjective experience of stress. “Poverty, and the poor health of the poor, is about much more than simply not having enough money…it is also about your psychological interactions with society at large and how readily society registers your existence.” (Robert Sapolsky 1998; 307).

1 comment:

Tisch said...

I found that the article "Neurological Bases of Individual Differences
in Emotional and Stress Responsiveness" began to touch on,
essentially, what our entire class is on: nature versus nurture. I,
like Meredith, felt the article left the levels of anxiety in LR rats
and other aspects of LR rats untouched, and instead focused on the HR
rats. Besides this, I thought it was really interesting to see that
although the HR rats were seemingly 'happier' since they weres showing
interest in novel experiences, they too, had high levels of anxiety.
What I wanted to understand, which was unprovided (and which continues
to boggle everyone) is WHY the HR and LR rats are HR or LR rats to
begin with? How did they become to act a certain way? We will
endlessly search to distinguish for the genetic and/or maternal
behavioral causes of animals and humans.