1) Using all measures, HRV of healthy subjects declines with aging, with measure-dependent patterns. 2) Using the SDNN index, rMSSD and pNN50, HRV of healthy subjects, particularly those >65 years old, may decrease to below levels associated with increased risk of mortality. 3) Gender influences HRV. Gender differences in HRV are age and measure dependent. 4) Age and gender also affect heart rate.

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Research suggests that police work is among the most stressful occupations in the world and officers typically suffer a variety of physiological, psychological, and behavioral effects and symptoms. Officers operating under severe or chronic stress are likely to be at greater risk of error, accidents, and overreactions that can compromise their performance, jeopardize public safety, and pose significant liability costs to the organization. Therefore, this study explored the nature and degree of physiological activation typically experienced of officers on the job and the impact of the Coherence Advantage resilience and performance enhancement training on a group of police officers from Santa Clara County, California.Areas assessed included vitality, emotional well-being, stress coping and interpersonal skills, work performance, workplace effectiveness and climate, family relationships, and physiological recalibration following acute stressors. Physiological measurements were obtained to determine the real-time cardiovascular impact of acutely stressful situations encountered in highly realistic simulated police calls used in police training and to identify officers at increased risk of future health challenges.The resilience-building training improved officers' capacity to recognize and self-regulate their responses to stressors in both work and personal contexts. Officers experienced reductions in stress, negative emotions, depression, and increased peacefulness and vitality as compared to a control group. Improvements in family relationships, more effective communication and cooperation within work teams, and enhanced work performance also were noted.Heart rate and blood pressure measurements taken during simulated police call scenarios showed that acutely stressful circumstances typically encountered on the job result in a tremendous degree of physiological activation, from which it takes a considerable amount of time to recover.Autonomic nervous system assessment based on heart rate variability (HRV) analysis of 24-hour electrocardiogram (ECG) recordings revealed that 11% of the officers were at higher risk for sudden cardiac death and other serious health challenges. This is more than twice the percentage typically found in the general population and is consistent with epidemiological data indicating that police officers have more than twice the average incidence of cardiovascular-related disease.The data suggest that training in resilience building and self-regulation skills could significantly benefit police organizations by improving judgment and decision making and decreasing the frequency of onthe-job driving accidents and the use of excessive force in high-stress situations. Potential outcomes include fewer citizens' complaints, fewer lawsuits, decreased organizational liabilities, and increased community safety. Finally, this study highlights the value of 24-hour HRV analysis as a useful screening tool to identify officers who are at increased risk, so that efforts can be made to reverse or prevent the...

Results suggest that a brief workplace stress management intervention can produce clinically significant reductions in BP and improve emotional health among hypertensive employees. Implications are that such interventions may produce a healthier and more productive workforce, enhancing performance and reducing losses to the organization resulting from cognitive decline, illness, and premature mortality.

A geometric grid class consists of those permutations that can be drawn on a specified set of line segments of slope ±1 arranged in a rectangular pattern governed by a matrix. Using a mixture of geometric and language theoretic methods, we prove that such classes are specified by finite sets of forbidden permutations, are partially well ordered, and have rational generating functions. Furthermore, we show that these properties are inherited by the subclasses (under permutation involvement) of such classes, and establish the basic lattice theoretic properties of the collection of all such subclasses.

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This study investigated the effects of a novel, classroom-based emotion self-regulation program (TestEdge) on measures of test anxiety, socioemotional function, test performance, and heart rate variability (HRV) in high school students. The program teaches students how to self-generate a specific psychophysiological state--psychophysiological coherence--which has been shown to improve nervous system function, emotional stability, and cognitive performance. Implemented as part of a larger study investigating the population of tenth grade students in two California high schools (N = 980), the research reported here was conducted as a controlled pre- and post-intervention laboratory experiment, using electrophysiological measures, on a random stratified sample of students from the intervention and control schools (N = 136). The Stroop color-word conflict test was used as the experiment's stimulus to simulate the stress of taking a high-stakes test, while continuous HRV recordings were gathered. The post-intervention electrophysiological results showed a pattern of improvement across all HRV measures, indicating that students who received the intervention program had learned how to better manage their emotions and to self-activate the psychophysiological coherence state under stressful conditions. Moreover, students with high test anxiety exhibited increased HRV and heart rhythm coherence even during a resting baseline condition (without conscious use of the program's techniques), suggesting that they had internalized the benefits of the intervention. Consistent with these results, students exhibited reduced test anxiety and reduced negative affect after the intervention. Finally, there is suggestive evidence from a matched-pairs analysis that reduced test anxiety and increased psychophysiological coherence appear to be directly associated with improved test performance--a finding consistent with evidence from the larger study.