0000000000662612
AUTHOR
N. Pfeifer
Stress and thermoregulation: different sympathetic responses and different effects on experimental pain.
Stress and thermoregulation both activate the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) but might differently affect pain. Studies investigating possible interactions in patients are problematic because of the high prevalence of SNS disturbances in patients. We therefore analyzed the influence of these different sympathetic challenges on experimentally-induced pain in healthy subjects. SNS was activated in two different ways: by mental stress (Stroop task, mental arithmetic task), and by thermoregulatory stimulation using a water-perfused thermal suit (7 degrees C, 32 degrees C, or 50 degrees C). Attentional effects of the mental stress tasks were controlled by using easy control tasks. Both, stress…
Imprecise probability assessments and the Square of Opposition
There is a long history of investigations on the square of opposition spanning over two millenia. A square of opposition represents logical relations among basic sentence types in a diagrammatic way. The basic sentence types, traditionally denoted by A (universal affirmative: ''Every S is P''), E (universal negative: ''No S is P''), I (particular affirmative: ''Some S are P''), and O (particular negative: ''Some S are not P''), constitute the corners of the square, and the logical relations--contradiction, contrarity, subalternation, and sub-contrarity--form the diagonals and the sides of the square. We investigate the square of opposition from a probabilistic point of view. To manage impre…