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Human attachment representations are shaped in interaction with the primary caregiver and are generally transferred to further bonding/ social partners later in life. According to previous evidence, primary attachment representations acquired with humans do not seem to be transferred to companion animals. This was held as a major factor why such animals would effectively provide social support also to persons with insecure attachment. The aim of this study in 19 male children, 7–11 years of age and with insecure-avoidant or disorganized attachment, was to investigate differences in their social behavior and in physiological responses when socially supported by an unfamiliar therapy dog in a socially stressful situation. The Trier Social Stress Test for Children (TSST-C) was conducted to elicit stress in the children when in the presence of the dog and a female human investigator. We found that boys with disorganized attachment (n=11) communicated more intensely than avoidantly attached boys (n=8) ...

Objective: Findings on the relationship between hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) activity and cognitive performance are inconsistent. We investigated whether personality in terms of emotion regulation abilities (ERA) moderates the relationship between stress-contingent HPA activity and intuition. Method: Participants’ (N = 49, aged 18 to 33 years, M = 22.48, SD = 3.33, 32 female) ERA and cortisol responses to social-evaluative stress as induced by a variant of the Trier Social Stress Test were determined. Subsequently, in a Remote Associates Task they provided intuitive judgments on whether word triples, primed by either stress reminding or neutral words, are coherent or not. Results: Under relative cortisol increase participants low in ERA showed reduced performance whereas individuals high in ERA showed increased performance. By contrast, under conditions of low cortisol change, individuals low in ERA showed increased performance compared to individuals high in ERA. Conclusions: ERA can moderate the link between stress and cognition so that existing effects may not be discovered across all individuals, which highlights the necessity to consider individual differences in ERA in stress research, or personality differences in general. We discuss the findings with respect to individual differences in neurobehavioral mechanisms potentially underlying ERA and corresponding interactions with cognitive processing.

Early identification of problems with psychosocial stress regulation is important for supporting mental and physical health. However, we currently lack knowledge about when reliable individual differences in stress-responsive physiology emerge and which aspects of maternal behavior determine the unfolding of infants' stress responses. Knowledge of these processes is further limited by analytic approaches that do not account for multiple levels of within- and between-family effects. In a low-risk sample (n= 100 dyads), we observed infant cortisol and mother/infant behavior during regular play and stress sessions longitudinally from age 1 to 3, and used a three-level model to separately examine variability in infant cortisol trajectories within sessions, across years, and across infants. Stable individual differences in hypothalamus–pituitary–adrenal axis regulation were observed in the first 3 years of life. Infants of less sensitive and more intrusive mothers manifested stress sensitization, that is, elevated cortisol levels during and following stress exposure, a profile related to behavioral distress. These findings have important practical implications, suggesting that children at risk for long-term stress dysregulation may be identified in the earliest years of life.

Previous research suggests that neuroendocrine mechanisms underlie inter-individual stress coping in couples. The neuropeptide oxytocin (OT), while regulating stress-sensitive HPA-axis activity might be crucial in this process. The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of dyadic coping abilities and OT on HPA-axis outcomes and constructive behavior during couple conflict. We conducted a secondary analysis of our previous database (Ditzen et al., 2009), assessing the modulating role of dyadic coping and intranasal OT on couple conflict behavior. The data revealed a significant interaction effect of the dyadic coping by oneself score and OT on cortisol responses during couple conflict, suggesting that particularly individuals with low a priori dyadic coping benefit from OT in terms of dampened HPA-activity. The results are in line with previous research suggesting OT's central role for stress regulation and prosocial behavior. Furthermore, an interaction with dyadic coping indicates adaptations in the sensitivity of the OT system during the individual attachment and relationship history. These data add to the evidence that the neuroendocrine attachment systems influence couple behavior. Future studies of neurobiological mechanisms underlying dyadic coping will be of high relevance for the development of prevention and intervention programs.

Mechanical remodeling of bone is a kind of adaptation and is performed to regulate the stress and/or strain in the tissue in response to the changing mechanical environment due to tissue growth and atrophy. We propose a phenomenological model of mechanical remodeling of bone structure considering residual stress. The lattice continuum model is used to represent the bone structure, such as the trabecular structure of cancellous bones. The basic idea in the previous report, which concerns mechanical remodeling that takes into account the residual stress, is extended to the continuum with the internal tissue structure. A remodeling rate equation of the tissue structure is expressed so as to result in an equistress state at the remodeling equilibrium as an optimality of the bone structure in the steady state. A case study of a long bone under bending moment reveals basic features of the proposed model of the stress regulation process. Remodeling simulation for the vertebral body under repetitive bending with compression demonstrates apparent density and residual stress distributions that coincide with the experimental observations.