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From: ironjustice on 1 Oct 2008 12:27
Cortisol levels are linked to mood changes.
--------------------------

Experimentally Induced Mood Changes Preferentially Affect Pain
Unpleasantness.
J Pain. 2008 Jun 5; : 18538637 (P,S,G,E,B,D)
[My paper] Marco L Loggia, Jeffrey S Mogil, M Catherine Bushnell
The Alan Edwards Centre for Research on Pain, McGill University,
Montreal, Canada; Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery, McGill
University, Montreal, Canada.
Our group previously demonstrated that changes in mood induced by
pleasant or unpleasant odors affect the perceived unpleasantness of
painful heat stimuli, without significantly altering perceived pain
intensity.
In the present study, we examined whether changing mood by viewing
emotionally laden visual stimuli also preferentially alters pain
unpleasantness.
12 female subjects immersed their right hand in hot water while
observing a video showing a person experiencing the same type of pain
(ie, model condition), unpleasant scenes not involving people (ie,
disasters condition), or a cityscape video (ie, cityscape condition).
Subjects were asked to rate pain intensity, pain unpleasantness, mood,
anxiety/calmness, and video unpleasantness, and their skin conductance
was measured throughout the experiment.
Pain unpleasantness (but not intensity) ratings were higher during the
disasters condition, which was associated with the worst mood, than
during the cityscape condition; neither mood nor pain unpleasantness
was altered in the model video compared with the cityscape video.
Moreover, mood was significantly correlated with pain unpleasantness
but not with pain intensity.
Because these results are similar to those observed when odors were
used to alter mood, we conclude that the effects of mood on the
affective components of pain are independent of mood induction
technique used.
PERSPECTIVE: This article provides new evidence that changes in mood
affect the pain experience by preferentially modulating pain
unpleasantness.
This finding could potentially help health professionals to treat pain
symptoms in patients with altered mood, suggesting methods of pain
management aimed at easing the affective, along with the sensory,
components of pain.

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Brief Communications
Smelling a Single Component of Male Sweat Alters Levels of Cortisol in
Women

Claire Wyart,1 Wallace W. Webster,2 Jonathan H. Chen,1 Sarah R. Wilson,
1 Andrew McClary,1 Rehan M. Khan,1 and Noam Sobel1,3

1Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California,
Berkeley, Berkeley, California 94720, 2Kaiser Permanente Hospital,
Oakland, California 94611, and 3Department of Neurobiology, Weizmann
Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel

Correspondence should be addressed to Claire Wyart at the above
address. Email: clairon(a)berkeley.edu

Rodents use chemosignals to alter endocrine balance in conspecifics.
Although responses to human sweat suggest a similar mechanism in
humans, no particular component of human sweat capable of altering
endocrine balance in conspecifics has yet been isolated and
identified. Here, we measured salivary levels of the hormone cortisol
in women after smelling pure androstadienone (4,16-androstadien-3-
one), a molecule present in the sweat of men that has been suggested
as a chemosignal in humans. We found that merely smelling
androstadienone maintained significantly higher levels of the hormone
cortisol in women. These results suggest that, like rodents, humans
can influence the hormonal balance of conspecifics through
chemosignals. Critically, this study identified a single component of
sweat, androstadienone, as capable of exerting such influence. This
result points to a potential role for synthetic human chemosignals in
clinical applications.


Key words: pheromones; hormones; chemosignals; human; olfaction;
cortisol
The Journal of Neuroscience, February 7, 2007, 27(6):1261-1265; doi:
10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4430-06.2007

Received Oct. 11, 2006; revised Dec. 6, 2006; accepted Jan. 4, 2007.

Correspondence should be addressed to Claire Wyart at the above
address. Email: clairon(a)berkeley.edu
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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