Emotional state

Intrinsic asthma, also called idiopathic asthma, usually develops in adulthood. In intrinsic asthma allergic factors are not demonstrable. Episodes of intrinsic asthma may be triggered by a variety of stimuli, eg, emotional state, exposure to cold air, or inert dusts. Both intrinsic and extrinsic asthmatics can be prone to exercise-induced attacks. Individuals who experience a combination of extrinsic and intrinsic asthmatic reactions have mixed asthma. Status asthmaticus refers to an especially acute life-threatening asthma attack which is resistant to normal treatments and which may require hospitalization in order to stabilize the patient. 

If placebo effects depended completely on the therapeutic relationship and patients emotional states, it would not be possible for the same person to show placebo effects and nocebo effects at the same time. But they do. Sometimes the same person reports both therapeutic benefits and side effects from the same placebo.15 Sometimes the more negative side effects they have experienced, the better they feel. That can happen because the side effects might convince them that they have been given a potent medication. Maybe their improvement was generated by their happiness over receiving what they believe to be an effective treatment for their condition, but this certainly would not explain their experience of side effects. 

My former student Guy Montgomery, who is now a researcher at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, demonstrated experimentally that placebo pain reduction cannot be completely explained by the patient s emotional state - or by any other factor that should affect a person s whole body instead of just part of it. He put a placebo cream on the index finger of one hand of his subjects and nothing at all on their other hand. Then he induced pain by putting heavy weights on the subjects index... 

Therapists and counselors also may wish to use one of several brief instruments that assess moods and emotions. These measures identify extreme emotional states that place the client at risk for drug use. A couple of the more well-known assessments include the Profile of Mood States (McNair, Lorr, Droppleman, 1992) and the Multiple Affect Adjective Check List (Herron, Bernstein, Rosen, 1968), which ask clients about various moods and emotions that they are experiencing at the moment. Furthermore, examining how the client socially interacts in therapy and treatment can identify strengths and weaknesses in the way a client is able to express emotions. If there are problems with identifying or expressing emotions, then the therapist or counselor can assess whether those problems are related to skill deficits. 

Abstract Human body odour is individually specific and several lines of evidence suggest that to some extent it is under genetic control. There are however numerous other sources of variation, commonly labelled as environmental factors, which are the main aim of this paper. These include 1) reproductive status, 2) emotional state, 3) diet and 4) diseases. We primarily focus on axillary and genital odours as they have been proposed to have communicative function. We prelusively conclude that a specific diet and some diseases have major impact on variations in human body odour. 

For a socially living individual it is of high relevance to be aware of the emotional state of one s conspecifics. It is a fairly well-known phenomenon that animals of different species react to odour emitted by another animal which is under stressful conditions. This led several researchers to the question of whether emotional state in humans can influence their body odour. This possibility was first tested by Chen and Haviland-Jones (2000), who asked their subjects to wear armpit pads while watching 13 min excerpts from a comedy or a fearful movie. Most of them watched both excerpts. Subsequently three and six choice tests were presented to raters who were instructed to pick the sample that smelled of people when they are happy or... 

That whole period is still very fuzzy to me. It s hard to remember what happened before the explosion and what happened after. I had such pain in my head and such hopelessness, and that sinking feeling, that I didn t want to go on at one point. How much of my emotional state was related to the trauma at work and how much was part of the chemical sensitivity I don t think anybody s qualified to answer that. 

Other common criteria for an emotion are its visceral and hormonal changes. There may be some specificity in visceral and hormonal patterns for various emotions, such as fear, anger, and disgust (Ekman, 1994, p. 17). At this point, however, there is only limited evidence for the specificity of these adjustments. One problem is individuals exhibit various patterns of adjustments to the same emotional state. 

Emotions are subjective mood states that interact reciprocally with cognitive processes. Personality refers to traits of emotion and behavior that are more stable over time. Normal and pathological emotional states can be measured, to some degree, with objective tests to quantify changes in mood over time (or after drug treatment). Thus, several clinical scales have been developed for anxiety, depression, and mania. These measures are particularly useful for evaluating the effectiveness of psychotherapeutic herbs. 

In contrast to the evidence for primers, signalers, and modulators, there is no decent evidence to suggest that there are human releaser pheromones. That is not to argue that there are none but to state that there is no evidence for them at present. Nonetheless, products purported to be human releaser pheromones—specifically sex attractants—are widely available on the Internet. They go by such suggestive names as Scent of Eros, The Edge, Alter-ego, and Pheromone Additive. Many of these products contain either androstenone or androstenol, steroids of unknown influence on the human emotional state. 

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