Novel approaches to measure physiological and behavioral responses to stress

by Jan Seidel
Cumulative thesis
Date of Examination:2019-12-02
Date of issue:2020-02-21
Advisor:Prof. Dr. Dr. Hannelore Ehrenreich
Referee:Prof. Dr. Dr. Hannelore Ehrenreich
Referee:Prof. Dr. Lars Penke
Persistent Address: http://dx.doi.org/10.53846/goediss-7845

 

 

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Abstract

English

Stress is the perception of threats to one's physical or psychological integrity, leading to certain autonomous, affective, and behavioral responses. Albeit its important role in adapting to new contexts and thus increasing chances of survival, severe - but also mild, chronic - forms of stress can lead to inappropriate behavioral patterns and even to physical and mental health issues. This thesis' aim is to deepen our understanding of stress responses via two different approaches: In Project I, we investigate the effects of negative early life experiences on violent aggressive behavior in four schizophrenia samples and two additional samples from the general population. Over all groups we showed that an accumulation of specific, well-defined, pre-adult environmental risk factors is strongly associated with aggression, not only in patients suffering from schizophrenia but also in individuals from the general population. Furthermore, we found elevated mRNA levels of histone deacetylase 1, a gene encoding an important epigenetic modulator, in individuals with a high amount of negative early life experiences. These results suggest that our models of accumulated environmental risk are suitable to accurately predict aggressive potential in both schizophrenia patients and healthy individuals. In Project II, we introduce a novel method for non-invasively measuring autonomous responses to social stress and its impact on the recognition ability in both mice and healthy men. In this translational study, we derived body surface temperatures via infrared thermography recordings in order to create ambient-independent, intraindividually adjusted thermal indices as readouts of stress. Considering the methodological limitations of former thermographic research, we describe and evaluate the quality of an innovative procedure to use infrared thermography, including a standardized pipeline of image recording as well as processing, data extraction, and analysis. This work contributes to our understanding of physiological and psychological stress responses and has several important implications for future research.
Keywords: clinical neuroscience; early life risk; epigenetics; flushing; human study; infrared thermography; mouse models of social learning; risk accumulation; social stimulus; stress measurement; temperature; translational study; vasoactivity; violent aggression
 
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