Although people's handshakes are thought to reflect their personality and influence our first impressions of them, these relations have seldom been formalLy investigated. One hundred twelve participants had their hand shaken twice by 4 trained coders (2 men and 2 women) and completed 4 personality measures. The participants' handshakes were stable and consistent across time and coders. There were also gender differences on most of the handshaking characteristics. A firm handshake was related positively to extraversion and emotional expressiveness and negatively to shyness and neuroticisin; it was also positively related to openness to experience, but only for women. Finally, handshake characteristics were •related to the impressions of the participants formed by the coders. These results demonstrate that personality traits, assessed through self-report, can predict specific behaviors assessed by trained observers. The pattern of relations among openness, gender, handshaking, and first impressions suggests that a firm handshake may be an effective form of self-promotion for women.Handshaking is a common greeting behavior and is often one of the first observations that individuals make of each other upon meeting. Thus, the handshake may be a basis for some of the initial impressions that an individual forms about another. Although handshakes are anecdotally believed to communicate information about a person's personality, little systematic research has been done on the relation between handshaking and personality. Indeed, the extent to which handshaking is sufficiently stable across time and consistent across situations to reflect stable individual differences is largely unknown. Handshaking has also historically been more common among men than it has been among women or between men and women. However, we know little about gender differences in handshaking characteristics or about how gender may be involved in relations between personality, initial impressions, and handshaking. The purpose of the present research is to assess the generalizability of some characteristics of handshaking behavior across time and gender; to test some hypotheses about the relations among handshaking dimensions, personality, and gender; and to evaluate the relation between handshaking dimensions and initial impressions formed about strangers.

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Pilots have reported experiencing in-flight hypoxic-like symptoms since the inception of high-altitude aviation. As a result, the need to monitor pilots, in-flight, for the onset of hypoxic conditions is of great interest to the aviation community. We propose that exhaled breath is an appropriate non-invasive medium for monitoring pilot hypoxic risk through volatile organic compound (VOC) analysis. To identify changes in the exhaled breath VOCs produced during periods of reduced O2 levels, volunteers were exposed to simulated flight profiles, i.e. sea level for 5 min, O2 levels found at elevated altitudes for 5 min or placebo and 5 min at 100% O2 recovery gas, using a modified flight mask interfaced with a reduced O2 breathing device. During the course of these test events, time series breath samples from the flight mask and pre/post bag samples were collected and analyzed by gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS). Seven compounds (pentanal, 4-butyrolactone, 2-pentanone, 2-hexanone, 2-cyclopenten-1-one, 3-methylheptane and 2-heptanone) were found to significantly change in response to hypoxic conditions. Additionally, the isoprene, 2-methyl-1,3-butadiene, was found to increase following the overall exposure profile. This study establishes an experimental means for monitoring changes in VOCs in response to hypoxic conditions, a computational workflow for compound analysis via the Metabolite Differentiation and Discovery Lab and MatLab(©) software and identifies potential volatile organic compound biomarkers of hypoxia exposure.

A discussion of congenital and familial erythrocytosis is presented, and a review of the literature regarding the possible mechanisms causing erythrocytosis is included.