Arousal, behavioral

Animal behavior has been dehned by Odnm (1971) as the overt action an organism takes to adjnst to its environment so as to ensure its survival. A simpler definition is the dynamic interaction of an animal with its enviromnent (D Mello 1992). Another, more elaborate, one is, the outward expression of the net interaction between the sensory, motor arousal, and integrative components of the central and peripheral nervons systems (Norton 1977). The last dehnition spells out the important point that behavior represents the integrated function of the nervous system. Accordingly, disruption of the nervous system by neurotoxic chemicals may be expected to cause changes in behavior (see Klaasen 1996, pp. 466-467). 

Human functioning the dual-interaction model. (From Smith, B.D., Effects of acute and habitual caffeine ingestion in physiology and behavior Tests of a biobehavioral arousal theory. Special issue Caffeine Research, Pharmacopsychoecologia, 7(2), 151-167, 1994. With permission.)... 

Arousal and cognition cross with the state-trait distinction in the Region-of-Intrapersonal Interaction to permit both state and trait forms of both arousal and cognition. The model places the Person in a Situational context, and both the Person and the Situation contribute separately and interactively to both physiological functioning and behavior. 

Only those areas of functioning that are directly relevant to arousal are affected by caffeine. Included would be certain aspects of emotion, performance affected by focused attention, and behavior relating to certain personality dimensions. 

Anxiety is related to higher physiological and behavioral arousal levels,98-164 especially levels of affective arousal.185-188 Similarly, caffeine has... 

Overall, there is strong support for the hypothesis that caffeine elevates physiological arousal. It may be of particular behavioral signifi-... 

As we noted earlier, caffeine affects not only arousal, but also other behavioral influences such as attentional focus. However, it now appears that these other effects may be secondary to the impact of the drug on arousal and that a multi-factorial model incorporating the inverted-U function may best describe that relationship. Most results in the literature to date are supportive of the biobehavioral model proposed here. However, research on the psychological effects of acute and habitual caffeine... 

Loewen, L. and Suedfeld, P., Cognitive and arousal effects of masking office noise. Environment and Behavior 24(3), 381-395, 1992. 

Ellis, L., Relationships of criminality and psychopathy with eight other apparent behavioral manifestations of sub-optimal arousal. Personality and Individual Differences 8(6), 905-925, 1987. 

Sawyer, D. A., Julia, H. L., Turin, A. C., Caffeine and human behavior Arousal, anxiety, and performance effects. Journal of Behavioral Medicine 5(4), 415-439, 1982. 

Trulson, M. E. Jacobs, B. L. (1979). Raphe unit activity in freely moving cats correlation with level of behavioral arousal. Brain Res. 163, 135-50. 

Sleep-wake state alterations in PD can be broadly classified into disturbances of (1) thalamocortical arousal state and (2) excessive nocturnal movement (Rye and Bliwise 2004 Rye and Iranzo 2005). The former includes the loss of sleep spindles and SWS, daytime sleepiness, and intrusion of REM sleep into daytime naps (i.e. sleep onset REM periods, or SOREMs), and the latter encompass periodic leg movements of sleep (PLMs) and REM sleep behavior disorder (RBD). The pathophysiological basis of sleepiness and SOREMs appears to be dopaminergic cell loss in PD, though excessive nocturnal movements are not as clearly related to dopaminergic deficits. 

Abrams, J. K., Johnson, P. L., Hay-Schmidt, A. et al. (2005). Serotonergic systems associated with arousal and vigilance behaviors following administration of anxiogenic drugs. Neuroscience 133, 983-97. 

Mong, J. A., et al. (2003b). Reduction of lipocalin-type prostaglandin D synthase in the preoptic area of female mice mimics estradiol effects on arousal and sex behavior. Proc. Natl. Acad. Set USA 100, 15206-11. 

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