Noise and mental performance: personality attributes and noise sensitivity.

The contradictory and confusing results in noise research on humans may partly be due to individual differences between the subjects participating in different studies. This review is based on a twelve year research on the role of neuroticism, extroversion and subjective noise sensitivity during mental work in noisy environment. Neurotic persons might show enhanced "arousability" i.e. their arousal level increases more in stress. Additional unfavorable factors for neurotics are worrying and anxiety, which might prevent them coping successfully with noise, or some other stressors during mental performance. In numerous experiments introverts have showed higher sensitivity to noise during mental performance compared to extroverts, while extroverts often cope with a boring task even by requesting short periods of noise during performance. Correlation analyses have regularly revealed a highly significant negative relation between extroversion and noise annoyance during mental processing. Numerous studies have shown that people with high noise sensitivity may be prevented from achieving the same work results as other people in noisy environment, thus leading to psychosomatic, neurotic or other difficulties. Positive relation between noise annoyance and subjective noise sensitivity might be very strong. Our results have shown, after matching with the results of other relevant studies, that more stable personality, with extroversive tendencies and with a relatively lower subjective noise sensitivity measured with standard questionnaires, may be expected to better adapt to noise during mental performance, compared to people with opposite personality traits.

Effects of cis-diamminedichloroplatinum II (cisplatin) on the splenic tissue of rats: a histoquantitative study.

Histoquantitative methods were applied to study the changes of splenic structure and proportions of splenic tissue compartments in cisplatin-treated (6 mg/kg body wt) male Wistar rats. Six days after treatment the significant reduction of volume density of white pulp was observed, which was due to the very prominent decrease of volume density of follicles. The volume density of periarteriolar lymphatic sheaths did not change substantially. Volume density of the marginal zone was also significantly reduced. A significant increase of volume density of connective tissue was observed. Morphometrical parameters of the follicles were also markedly altered: the number of follicles per mm2 of spleen section area, the numerical density of the follicles in the spleen, and the total number of the follicles were significantly reduced.