Aspects of Psychological Aging and Technology

1985 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-121
Author(s):  
Stig Berg

Aging is generally regarded as a reduction of physical, psychological, and social resources. This reduction is due to two processes that operate simultaneously during the life of an individual. One of these processes is the basic biological changes which take place within the individual and are probably programmed by genetic factors. The other is change due to environmental factors, such as air pollution, noise, poor working conditions, and eating habits, social and psychological factors such as attitudes and norms, and technological factors which can enhance adaptation or cause a decline in social or psychological resources. According to present knowledge, biological age changes are irreversible. However, it should be possible to reverse the environmental changes either through short-term interventions among individuals and the community, or by long-term interventions in the society.

Human Affairs ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Miroslav Popper

AbstractThe article approaches the topic of social trust from an evolutionary perspective. It begins by summarising the most influential approaches that have defined specific and social trust and ascertains what causes differences in degrees of trust and how the potential risk of deception might be lowered. It then notes that the basis of morality had already been formed during the era of prehistoric man, who was able to create coalitions against aggressors and to socially control the behaviour of deviants. It points out, however, that having a certain predisposition to behaving cooperatively or an increased sensitivity to recognising and not tolerating behaviour aimed at abusing cooperation is not a sufficient guarantee of the fact that people will always (or at least in the majority of situations) favour cooperation over deception. One of the reasons for this is a tendency to favour short-term gains over long-term ones. The article argues that establishing norms (moral, social and legal) produces a higher level of social trust because it not only “encourages” individuals to behave in certain ways in particular situations but also works as a sanction which “discourages” the individual from socially deviant behaviour. The article then focuses on a debate about the causal relationship between social trust and social capital. It discusses the suggestion that political institutions, government and the judiciary may reduce rather than raise levels of social capital and consequently also the level of social trust. This is partly because of their powerful position and the consequent scope for corruption and partly because of the fact that even when attempting to act honestly, representatives of these institutions cannot sufficiently reflect upon dynamic change at the local level. Finally, the article ends by adopting the position that social trust is built primarily from bottom up and so it is risky to continually doubt the very existence and usefulness of social norms and morality and to be governed simply by legal norms.


2021 ◽  
pp. 68-70
Author(s):  
Nitin Hiraman Suryawanshi ◽  
Amit Aggarwal ◽  
Abhijit Kadam

A study of stroke in young patients has recently become a subject of interest. This is due to a lot of impact on the individual and society. Study of stroke in young patients can lead to therapeutical results affecting both short term and long-term outcomes. Our study is hospital based retrospective study for duration of 1 year. Thi Methods: Results: s study revealed stroke in young in 25.16% of all stroke cases, with cerebral infarction in 56% and followed by intracerebral haemorrhage in 25.64%, and cerebral venous thrombosis in 18%. The most common presenting symptom was hemiparesis. The most prevalent risk factor for stroke in young was hypertension followed by diabetes mellitus, alcohol consumption and smoking. Stroke in young requires a differe Conclusion: nt approach to investigate and treat. This is due to different underlying etilogy as compared to elderly. Although traditional risk factors are associated with stroke, behavioural pattern such as smoking and alcohol may cause and promote development of stroke in young.


Paleobiology ◽  
1975 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 238-257 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth R. Walker ◽  
Leonard P. Alberstadt

Succession involves changes in a community through time, whether internally or externally controlled. As succession progresses, niche specialization, species diversity (variety and equitability), complexity of food chains, and pattern diversity increase; net production and species growth rate decrease. We apply the succession concept to three types of ancient community sequences: 1) fossil reefs (Ordovician—Cretaceous in age), 2) short-term successions occurring through thin stratigraphic intervals, and 3) long-term successions occurring through thicker stratigraphic intervals. Ancient reefs show four vertical zones: (1) a basal stabilization zone (autogenic), 2) the overlying colonization zone (autogenic, pioneer stage), 3) the diversification zone, the bulk of most reefs (diversification culminating in climax), and 4) the uppermost domination zone. The first three zones represent autogenic succession but the final stage may involve allogenic succession. Short-term succession usually occurs where periodic allogenic catastrophes wipe out the community which is rebuilt through autogenic succession. Opportunistic pioneer species are important and in our examples (Ordovician, Silurian, and Cretaceous) are species which pave soft substrata. Paleozoic strophomenid brachiopods filled this role, and inoceramid pelecypods served the function in the Mesozoic. The succession which begins with opportunists progresses to a climax community of equilibrists. Repetition of catastrophe-succession couplets produces a cyclic stratigraphic record. Long-term successions are recorded in thicker stratigraphic sequences, and are of two types: 1) autogenic succession in unchanging physical environments and 2) allogenic succession in changing physical environments. Our examples of these are from the Devonian Haragan-Bois D'Arc formations of Oklahoma and the Lime Creek Formation of Iowa. This type of succession represents a temporal-spatial mosaic. The Haragan data (unchanging environments) indicate characteristic, intergrading, and ubiquitous species in the brachiopod communities. Most ubiquitous species in the pioneer community were eurytopic opportunists. The Lime Creek data allows testing of the prediction that environmental changes cause regression to an earlier succession stage. The brachiopod communities after environmental changes have more ubiquitous and intergrading eurytopic species. These represent an earlier stage in the succession.


2015 ◽  
Vol 137 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernt J. Leira ◽  
Dag Myrhaug

The paper provides long-term bivariate distributions of wave power with wave height, and wave power with wave period. This is relevant for assessments of wave power devices and their potential for converting energy from waves. The results can be applied to compare systematically the wave power potential for individual waves at different locations based on short-term statistical description of the individual waves and the long-term statistical information of the wave climate. Furthermore, it allows for assessment of the efficiency of a given wave power device for each location.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (11) ◽  
pp. 144
Author(s):  
Carmen A. Sierra Llamas ◽  
Rafael E. Donado Castillo ◽  
Gustavo Aroca ◽  
Santos Ángel Depine ◽  
Gladys Gaviria ◽  
...  

The purpose of this study is to determine the levels of anxiety and depression in patients aged between 18 and 70 years, hospitalized with chronic kidney disease in a clinic entity of the city of Barranquilla. The type of research is descriptive, presenting the information through the indicators and statistical tables, the Hospital Scale of Anxiety and Depression of, Zigmond & Smith (1983), which evaluates the detection of depressive and anxious disorders in the non-psychiatric hospital context. The application of the Scale was performed in the hospital entity of the city of Barranquilla to 50 patients with Chronic Kidney Disease. The results they are beneficial in the short term, because they create new research proposals applied to another population group diagnosed with chronic diseases, especially for the evaluation and intervention in the area of health psychology. In the long term, new theories, methods of intervention and evaluation applied to the population of patients with chronic kidney disease will be studied. In the same way, the results show marked trends related to depression, an aspect that is consistent with the deterioration that affects the individual in the course of the disease and also show a positive correlation of the study variables, depression and anxiety disorders in patients with CKD can be due to a symptomatology or consequence of psychological burnout.


Author(s):  
Tania Chavarria Pizarro ◽  
Philipp Resl ◽  
Aleksandar Janjic ◽  
Silke Werth

Anthropogenic climate change has led to unprecedented shifts in temperature across many ecosystems. In a context of rapid environmental changes, acclimation is an important process as it may influence the capacity of organisms to survive under novel thermal conditions. Mechanisms of acclimation could involve upregulation of stress response genes involved in protein folding, DNA damage repair and the regulation of signal transduction genes, along with a simultaneous downregulation of genes involved in growth or cell cycle, in order to maintain cellular functions and equilibria. We transplanted Lobaria pulmonaria lichens originating from different forests to determine the relative effects of long-term acclimation and genetic factors on the variability in expression of mycobiont and photobiont genes. We found a strong response of mycobiont and photobiont to high temperatures, regardless of sample origin. The green-algal photobiont had an overall lower response than the mycobiont. The gene expression of both symbionts was also influenced by acclimation to transplantation sites and by genetic factors. Lobaria pulmonaria seems to have evolved powerful molecular pathways to deal with environmental fluctuations and stress and can acclimate to new habitats by transcriptomic convergence. Although L. pulmonaria has the molecular machinery to counteract short-term thermal stress, survival of lichens like L. pulmonaria depends mostly on their long-term positive carbon balance, which can be compromised by warmer temperatures and reduced precipitation, and both these outcomes have been predicted for Central Europe in connection with global climate change


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfredo Rago ◽  
Kostas Kouvaris ◽  
Tobias Uller ◽  
Richard Watson

AbstractAdaptive plasticity allows organisms to cope with environmental change, thereby increasing the population’s long-term fitness. However, individual selection can only compare the fitness of individuals within each generation: if the environment changes more slowly than the generation time (i.e., a coarse-grained environment) a population will not experience selection for plasticity even if it is adaptive in the long-term. How does adaptive plasticity then evolve? One explanation is that, if competing alleles conferring different degrees of plasticity persist across multiple environments, natural selection between lineages carrying those alleles could select for adaptive plasticity (lineage selection).We show that adaptive plasticity can evolve even in the absence of such lineage selection. Instead, we propose that adaptive plasticity in coarse-grained environments evolves as a by-product of inefficient short-term natural selection. In our simulations, populations that can efficiently respond to selective pressures follow short-term, local, optima and have lower long-term fitness. Conversely, populations that accumulate limited genetic change within each environment evolve long-term adaptive plasticity even when plasticity incurs short-term costs. These results remain qualitatively similar regardless of whether we decrease the efficiency of natural selection by increasing the rate of environmental change or decreasing mutation rate, demonstrating that both factors act via the same mechanism. We demonstrate how this mechanism can be understood through the concept of learning rate.Our work shows how plastic responses that are costly in the short term, yet adaptive in the long term, can evolve as a by-product of inefficient short-term selection, without selection for plasticity at either the individual or lineage level.


Author(s):  
Eric M. Wassermann

The variable amplitude of motor cortex is a striking aspect of the muscle response to transcranial magnetic stimulation. It is easy to produce large motor-evoked potentials (MEPs) in some healthy subjects, while others' cortico-muscular pathways seem barely excitable, even by the strongest available stimuli. MEP amplitude and other measures also vary widely within individuals over time. The factors of these differences among and within individuals are age, gross anatomy of the individuals, genetic factors, and physiological differences associated with behavioural and other traits such as personality, conditions like migraine. The MEP varies over time within individuals at rest under laboratory conditions. These variations can be short term or long term. Differences among neurologically normal individuals have important implications for research using TMS. These differences open doors to new fields of study to neurophysiologists in the treatment and etiology of brain disease.


2019 ◽  
Vol 189 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen E Gilman ◽  
Mady Hornig

Abstract The developmental origins of health and disease (DOHaD) model promises a greater understanding of early development but has left unresolved the balance of risks and benefits to offspring of medication use during pregnancy. Masarwa et al. (Am J Epidemiol. 2018;187(8):1817–1827) conducted a meta-analysis of the association between in utero acetaminophen exposure and risks of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD). A challenge of meta-analyzing results from observational studies is that summary measures of risk do not correspond to well-defined interventions when the individual studies adjusted for different covariate sets, which was the case here. This challenge limits the usefulness of observational meta-analyses for inferences about etiology and treatment planning. With that limitation understood, Masarwa et al. reported a 20%–30% higher risk of ADHD and ASD following prenatal acetaminophen exposure. Surprisingly, most of the original studies did not report diagnoses of ADHD or ASD. As a result, their summary estimates of risk are not informative about children’s likelihood of ADHD and ASD diagnoses. The long-term promise of DOHaD remains hopeful, but more effort is needed in the short-term to critically evaluate observational studies suggesting risks associated with medications used to treat conditions during pregnancy that might have adverse consequences for a developing fetus.


1967 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 633-639 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emery Zoltan Lajtai

A section of varved clays exposed by excavations for the University–Bloor–Danforth Subway in Toronto is described. The individual varves are noted, in general, for such irregular features as erosional structures, poor sorting and grading, sublaminations, and angular fragments of unconsolidated material scattered in the coarse-grained layer. The most characteristic property of an individual varve is the sorting and grading of the coarse-grained layer. On this basis three groups can be distinguished: graded, complex, and diamictic varved clays. Deposition from a special type of turbidity current, the meltwater bottomflow, offers the best explanation for the origin of these varves. The deposition of complex varves, which are the typical varves of the section, probably takes place from continuous meltwater bottomflows that vary in sediment load. Because of the continuity of meltwater currents, sedimentation occurs under the influence of three independent but overlapping processes: settling from a graded suspension, addition of coarse sediments rolled along the bottom, and deposition from a uniform clay suspension. Complex varve structures and textures reflect variations in the coarse sediment load that is ultimately controlled by short-term (commonly diurnal) and long-term temperature variations (chiefly seasonal) affecting the rate of melting at the glacier and consequently the discharge and competence of meltwater currents. The deposition of graded and diamictic varved clays, on the other hand, probably takes place from either single overflows or single bottomflows.


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