Life Science Hardware and Software

One of the foundational concepts making virtual reality (VR) video games of high interest is the game’s ability to transport the user to a flow state. The visual and auditory stimuli presented are highly immersive, leading the user to focus entirely…

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to regulate your emotional reactions? Birk and Bonanno (2016) studied the adaptiveness of modifying emotional regulation (ER) strategies based on affective and physiological feedback. They wanted to understand how people…

I think I’ll go to the gym… Scientists have long used the power of physiological signals to make inferences about cognitive processes. To bridge the gap between physiology and psychology, exercise scientists often find it interesting to look at a…

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a common treatment for people who suffer mental health disorders, such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. The goal of this treatment is to help reduce many of the symptoms surrounding the patients’…

The negative effects of stress on the body have been widely studied. Stress can be defined as a situation that is causing the current state, or homeostasis, under pressure to change. The human body’s nervous system reacts to stress by changing the amount…

Very little is known about the origins of cardiovascular risk factors like obesity and altered glucose metabolism and their development during childhood. Adolescence is a time when individuals develop their own health behaviors while gaining increasing…

Psychophysiological Monitoring of Fear Extinction An estimated 10% of the general population experiences fear of flying (FOF) and 25% of the population that flies experiences distress during the flight. The most effective psychological technique…

A flow state typically occurs when a person’s abilities match the level of difficulty for the current task they are completing. During this state, researchers have found that most people who exhibit flow experience changes in blood pressure, muscle…

Muscle mechanical energy expenditure shows the neuromotor strategies used by the nervous system to analyze human locomotion tasks and is directly related to its efficiency. Kaur, Shilpi, Bhatia, and Joshi investigated the impact of gender on the…

A growing health risk in modern times is the increased amount of time the average person spends sitting. Whether at work for 8 hours at a computer or on the couch all day watching a favorite show, sitting contributes to a sedentary lifestyle, which…

Schizophrenia has long been known to be a very complicated and poorly understood cognitive disorder. To attempt to understand the differences in emotional processing in schizophrenic patients, psychologists use physiological parameters to quantify…

Exercise researchers at Johns Hopkins University recently performed a study regarding the effectiveness of using short-term heart rate variability (HRV) as a means to monitor the efficiency and safety of cycling activity. Though it had been previously…