Activación emocional en sujetos humanos: procedimientos para la inducción experimental de estrés

Abstract

Resumen El estudio de los efectos del estrés sobre la cognición y el comportamiento es un área de especial interés y desarrollo científico, tanto para la Psicología como para las Neurociencias. La inducción de estrés constituye un elemento fundamental en estos estudios, pues permite la manipulación de esta forma de activación emocional, como variable independiente, para observar su efecto sobre la conducta; no obstante, esta inducción debe ser suficiente para generar incrementos significativos en los niveles de cortisol y cumplir los estándares éticos establecidos para la experimentación con humanos. El presente artículo tiene como propósito aportar una revisión general sobre la activación emocional, para profundizar en el conocimiento acerca de los procedimientos utilizados en la inducción experimental de estrés en sujetos humanos. Se concluye que se requiere el diseño de protocolos más eficaces, para lo cual, el uso de las simulaciones y otras herramientas tecnológicas puede ser de gran utilidad.

The Ravages of Enforced Disappearance: A Psychoanalytic Perspective of Traumatic Events and Encrypted Mourning

“…Relatives may join social movements intending to denounce the traumatizing actions inflicted on their loved ones. Their narrated testimonies may favor the representation of their trauma, fostering a symbolic construction that moves a subject away from traumatic paralysis (Ferreira & Caniato, 2019). Collective acts are fundamental.…”

“…They found that spouses and parents of missing persons appeared the most affected and that the number of traumatic events that family members had been exposed to was significantly associated with increased levels of psychopathology (Lenferink et al, 2019). Ferreira and Caniato (2019) addressed mourning vis-à-vis persons who disappeared for political reasons during Brazil’s military dictatorship. They discovered that melancholy paralyzed subjects into a mortifying state in such types of loss.…”

“…Conversely, mourning the deceased offered the potential for movement: factual death is different from a demise that must be assumed. Ferreira and Caniato also added that some military regimes could legitimize torture and disappearances as strategies of “saving the nation” and as a political precaution (Ferreira & Caniato, 2019). Consequently, relatives of the disappeared may join social movements that seek to expose the truth by narrating their experiences and demanding justice for the missing.…”

Effects of psychological stress on the emission of volatile organic compounds from the skin

“…The development of experiments on humans requires the creation of non-invasive procedures that guarantee limited effects, do not persist in the long term, and generate moderate levels of stress, sufficient to observe their effects without generating harm to the study participants. As mentioned by Ferreira 16 “stress induction procedures must include elements of novelty, unpredictability, loss of control, representing a potential threat or loss, and, in some cases, social evaluation”. Only three publications have described the characterization of VOCs emitted during psychological stress in humans.…”

Exploring stress response’s role in executive function impairments among adults with early adverse childhood experiences

“…Furthermore, both the SCWT and emotional content in the tasks were shown to be effective at inducing stress in a controlled laboratory setting 43 . In terms of methodology, some of the studies used some form of stress-inducing material 22 , 23 , 33 , 38 , 41 , 42 , although none of them specifically investigated the potential mediating or moderating role of the activation of the SRS during the task.…”