Direct handling of "Relaxing" for experiments.

2013 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 24653213
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Challenging Exploratory Research
• Allocation Type: Single-year Grants
• Research Field: Experimental psychology
• Research Institution: Nara Institute of Science and Technology
• Principal Investigator: KOMAI Shoji 奈良先端科学技術大学院大学, バイオサイエンス研究科, 准教授 (50420469)
• Project Period (FY): 2012-04-01 – 2014-03-31
• Keywords: リラックス / 条件づけ

Research Abstract

We modern human beings have been suffered from severe mental stress these days. Then people have tried to take care of it by using of various methods called "relaxation". The relaxation itself, however, seems to be mysterious to handle in experimental conditions. This is simply because we have no subjective marker of relaxation rather than stress condition. Animal clearly raises the concentration of glucocorticoids and drops the body temperature accompanied with stress stimulus. We here tried to arrange the schedule to mobile the relaxation condition in a particular stressful situation according to classical conditioning paradigm. We found that the physical stimuli could work as unconditioned stimuli to bring out the relaxation condition rather than chemical stimuli, because of precise reaching time to their sensors, which helps the stimuli to be strongly conditioned.