Airflow and autonomic responses to stress and relaxation in asthma: The impact of stressor type

Asthma self-efficacy, high frequency heart rate variability, and airflow obstruction during negative affect in daily life

“…This suggests that individuals with low levels of self-efficacy may be particularly susceptible to parasympathetically-mediated bronchoconstriction during stressful episodes that elicit subjective reports of negative affect. This possibility is consistent with the results of our recent laboratory study that found higher levels of HFHRV in response to a passive stressor (immersion of hand in cold water) in asthmatics with lower, versus higher, levels of asthma selfefficacy (Aboussafy et al, 2005). However, as noted above, both respiration rate and volume contribute significantly to heart rate variability, making it impossible to interpret the index unambiguously in terms of cardiac vagal tone (Grossman et al, 1991;Ritz et al, 2001).…”

Cardiac data increase association between self-report and both expert ratings of task load and task performance in flight simulator tasks: An exploratory study

“…In boring tasks, increased LF HRV may reflect general relaxation. During task overload, it may reflect withdrawal from the task, perhaps a component of the "play dead" response involving increased vasovagal activity, such as occurs when facing life-threatening challenges where coping is not possible, and where passive coping predominates (Aboussafy et al, 2005;Lehrer et al, 1996).…”

Association of Asthma Self-efficacy to Asthma Control and Quality of Life

“…The ASES is rated on a five-point scale from "no confidence" to "very confident" and yields scores from 0 to 320, with higher scores denoting better asthma self-efficacy. The ASES has been used extensively in past research [8,12,13] and has shown to have very high internal consistency (α=0.97) and good test-retest reliability (r=0.77) [4,8].…”