The Acute Effect Of A Laboratory Shame Induction Protocol On Endothelial Function
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Shame is a self-conscious emotion that arises when one internalizes social devaluations from others. Increased shame in a laboratory setting is associated with increased cortisol and tumor necrosis factor alpha activity, however, no studies have investigated the acute effects of shame on important indices of cardiovascular disease risk such as endothelial function. The endothelium is a single layer of cells which lines the inside of all arteries and acts as a vasoprotective and vasoactive agent by inhibiting the development of atherosclerosis and adjusting vessel diameter in response to changes in blood flow associated shear stress (flow-mediated dilation). PURPOSE: The objective of this study was to examine the impact of a shame induction protocol on endothelial function. METHODS: Fifteen, young (23 ± 2 years), healthy participants (n = 7 men, n = 8 women) completed both a 20-min written shame induction and control protocol on two different experimental days. Pre- and post-protocol we assessed: 1) Endothelial function via a standard brachial artery reactive hyperemia flow-mediated dilation (RH-FMD) test which was characterized as the peak % and absolute change in diameter following release of 5 min of forearm occlusion, and; 2) Perceived shame via the Experiential Shame Scale (ESS). RESULTS: Shame increased in response to the shame induction protocol (pre: 2.9 ± 0.6 vs. post: 3.7 ± .5, p < 0.001) but not the control protocol (pre: 3.0 ± 0.5 vs. post: 2.8 ± 0.5, p = 0.15). %RH-FMD significantly decreased in response to the shame protocol (pre: 4.8 ± 1.9 vs. post: 3.2 ± 1.6, p < 0.001) but not the control protocol (4.2 ± 1.8 vs. post: 3.8 ± 1.5, p = 0.45). Covariation of the shear stress stimulus for RH-FMD did not alter the RH-FMD results. Increased shame was significantly associated with decreased absolute RH-FMD (r = -0.37, p = 0.046). CONCLUSIONS: The shame induction protocol caused a significant increase in shame and reduction in RH-FMD. This suggests that temporary increases in shame cause transient endothelial dysfunction which, if chronically repeated, could manifest as reduced vasoprotection against atherosclerosis. Supported by a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) discovery grant.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".