research-article

The Psychophysiological Effects of Cross-Cultural Transaction in Foreign Students in Russia: a Pilot Study

Authors:

Iuliia Muzychenko,

Irina Apollonova,

Li ZhangAuthors Info & Claims

ICMHI '19: Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Medical and Health Informatics

Pages 99 - 105

https://doi.org/10.1145/3340037.3340062

Published: 17 May 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Have you ever studied or worked abroad? Most people assume it would be stressful --- but would you ever think that it could be detrimental to your health, though? Stress literature relates cross-cultural transactions to the chances of gaining higher levels of chronic stress. The present article aims to study if the psychological stress linked to relocation to a different country can possibly lead to psychobiological effects of chronic stress, namely elevated levels of resting heart rate. A longitudinal pilot study was conducted for 10 expatriate students during the first 2-5 months (with a mean of 3.6 months) of their relocation. Quantitative data was gathered via surveys cross-sectionally, the health data and daily activity journals were collected weekly and provided continuous information about the participants' pulse rate and clues of what its changes can be related to. The results show that the participants have changes in the resting heart rate (RHR) baseline and thus are consistent with those of previous chronic stress research. However, additional further research is required for the consistency of the data and for identifying risk markers and individual stress pathways, with the goal of identifying "at-risk" students and providing treatment options before any serious harm is done to their health.

References

[1]

P. G. Altbach and J. Knight, "The Internationalization of Higher Education: Motivations and Realities," Journal of Studies in International Education, vol. 11, no. 3-4, pp. 290--305, 2007.

[2]

V. K. Gupta, C. Guo, M. Canever, H. R. Yim, G. K. Sraw, and M. Liu, "Institutional environment for entrepreneurship in rapidly emerging major economies: the case of Brazil, China, India, and Korea," International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 367--384, 2012.

[3]

O.N. Bykova, T.K. Ermolaeva, O.O. Scraybin, "Strategies of Russian Education Internationalization Development," ESPACIOS, Vol. 39 (Nº 49) pp 24, 2018.

[4]

Z.A. Latipov, A.M. Ziyatdinov, L.A. Demidova,V. Gerasimov, M.N. Zaostrovtseva, "The problem of adaptation of foreign students studying in Russian universities," ESPACIOS, Vol. 38 (Nº 56) pp 27, 2017.

[5]

T. A. Nailevna, "Acculturation and Psychological Adjustment of Foreign Students (the Experience of Elabuga Institute of Kazan Federal University)," Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, vol. 237, pp. 1173--1178, 2017.

[6]

K. V. Pyrkova, "Features of International Students' Adaptation (on the Basis of a Russian Higher Education Institution)," International Electronic Journal of Mathematics Education, 11(4), 611--621, 2016.

[7]

T. H. Holmes and R. H. Rahe, "The social readjustment rating scale," Journal of Psychosomatic Research, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 213--218, 1967.

[8]

J. Brosschot, B. Verkuil, and J. Thayer, "Generalized Unsafety Theory of Stress: Unsafe Environments and Conditions, and the Default Stress Response," International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, vol. 15, no. 3, p. 464, 2018.

[9]

J. F. Brosschot, B. Verkuil, and J. F. Thayer, "The default response to uncertainty and the importance of perceived safety in anxiety and stress: An evolution-theoretical perspective," Journal of Anxiety Disorders, vol. 41, pp. 22--34, 2016.

[10]

J. F. Brosschot, B. Verkuil, and J. F. Thayer, "Exposed to events that never happen: Generalized unsafety, the default stress response, and prolonged autonomic activity," Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, vol. 74, pp. 287--296, 2017.

[11]

G. S. J. Everly, Clinical guide to the treatment of the human stress response. Place of publication not identified: Springer, 2015.

[12]

G. M. Slavich, "Life Stress and Health," Teaching of Psychology, vol. 43, no. 4, pp. 346--355, 2016.

[13]

B. S. McEwen, "Central effects of stress hormones in health and disease: Understanding the protective and damaging effects of stress and stress mediators," European Journal of Pharmacology, vol. 583, no. 2-3, pp. 174--185, 2008.

[14]

M. E. Pritchard, G. S. Wilson, and B. Yamnitz, "What Predicts Adjustment Among College Students? A Longitudinal Panel Study," Journal of American College Health, vol. 56, no. 1, pp. 15--22, 2007.

[15]

C. Draine, and B. Hall, "Culture Shock: A Guide to Customs and Etiquette," Graphics Arts Center Publishing Company, Portland, OR., 2000.

[16]

M. V. Aswegen, The establishment of an adjustment model for expatriates. 2005.

[17]

S. Yoon, J. K. Sim, and Y.-H. Cho, "A Flexible and Wearable Human Stress Monitoring Patch," Scientific Reports, vol. 6, no. 1, 2016.

[18]

S. D. Truman, D. A. Sharar, and J. C. Pompe, "The Mental Health Status of Expatriate Versus U.S. Domestic Workers," International Journal of Mental Health, vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 3--18, 2011.

[19]

H. Mora, D. Gil, R. M. Terol, J. Azorín, and J. Szymanski, "An IoT-Based Computational Framework for Healthcare Monitoring in Mobile Environments," Sensors, vol. 17, no. 10, p. 2302, 2017.

[20]

S.-H. Seo and J.-T. Lee, "Stress and EEG," Convergence and Hybrid Information Technologies, 2010.

[21]

R.-P. Juster, G. Bizik, M. Picard, G. Arsenault-Lapierre, S. Sindi, L. Trepanier, M.-F. Marin, N. Wan, Z. Sekerovic, C. Lord, A. J. Fiocco, P. Plusquellec, B. S. Mcewen, and S. J. Lupien, "A transdisciplinary perspective of chronic stress in relation to psychopathology throughout life span development," Development and Psychopathology, vol. 23, no. 03, pp. 725--776, 2011.

[22]

I. N. Muzychenko, L. Zhang, I. A. Apollonova, A. P. Nikolaev, A. V. Pisareva, and S. G. Malikova, "Development of a method for assessing the effects of chronic stress on the human body," Journal of Physics: Conference Series, vol. 1118, p. 012027, 2018.

[23]

L. Piwek, D. A. Ellis, S. Andrews, and A. Joinson, "The Rise of Consumer Health Wearables: Promises and Barriers," PLOS Medicine, vol. 13, no. 2, 2016.

[24]

J. M. Peake, G. Kerr, and J. P. Sullivan, "A Critical Review of Consumer Wearables, Mobile Applications, and Equipment for Providing Biofeedback, Monitoring Stress, and Sleep in Physically Active Populations," Frontiers in Physiology, vol. 9, 2018.

[25]

C. Schubert, M. Lambertz, R. Nelesen, W. Bardwell, J.-B. Choi, and J. Dimsdale, "Effects of stress on heart rate complexity---A comparison between short-term and chronic stress," Biological Psychology, vol. 80, no. 3, pp. 325--332, 2009.

[26]

J. Sacha, "Interaction between Heart Rate and Heart Rate Variability," Annals of Noninvasive Electrocardiology, vol. 19, no. 3, pp. 207--216, 2014.

[27]

J.-M. Lee, H. C. Kim, J. I. Kang, and I. Suh, "Association between stressful life events and resting heart rate," BMC Psychology, vol. 2, no. 1, 2014.

[28]

Y. Ostchega, K.S. Porter, J.P. Hughes, C.F. Dillon, & T. Nwankwo, "Resting pulse rate reference data for children, adolescents, and adults: United States, 1999--2008." National health statistics reports 41: 1--16, 2011.

[29]

D. Nanchen, "Resting heart rate: what is normal?," Heart, vol. 104, no. 13, pp. 1048--1049, 2018.

[30]

A. Zhang, J. T. Hughes, A. Brown, P. D. Lawton, A. Cass, W. Hoy, K. O'Dea, and L. J. Maple-Brown, "Resting heart rate, physiological stress and disadvantage in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians: analysis from a cross-sectional study," BMC Cardiovascular Disorders, vol. 16, no. 1, 2016.

[31]

J. S. Black and G. K. Stephens, "The Influence of the Spouse on American Expatriate Adjustment and Intent to Stay in Pacific Rim Overseas Assignments," Journal of Management, vol. 15, no. 4, pp. 529--544, 1989.

[32]

F. González-Landero, I. García-Magariño, R. Lacuesta, and J. Lloret, "Green Communication for Tracking Heart Rate with Smartbands," Sensors, vol. 18, no. 8, p. 2652, 2018.

[33]

K. Georgiou, A. V. Larentzakis, N. N. Khamis, G. I. Alsuhaibani, Y. A. Alaska, and E. J. Giallafos, "Can Wearable Devices Accurately Measure Heart Rate Variability? A Systematic Review," Folia Medica, vol. 60, no. 1, 2018.

[34]

F. El-Amrawy and M. I. Nounou, "Are Currently Available Wearable Devices for Activity Tracking and Heart Rate Monitoring Accurate, Precise, and Medically Beneficial?," Healthcare Informatics Research, vol. 21, no. 4, p. 315, 2015.

[35]

E. J. Mezick, K. A. Matthews, M. H. Hall, J. R. Jennings, and T. W. Kamarck, "Sleep duration and cardiovascular responses to stress in undergraduate men," Psychophysiology, vol. 51, no. 1, pp. 88--96, 2013.

[36]

D.H. Hellhammer, A.A. Stone, J. Hellhammer, and J. Broderick, "Measuring Stress. Encyclopedia of Behavioral Neuroscience," 2, 186--191, 2010.

[37]

M. N. Sawka and K. E. Friedl, "Emerging Wearable Physiological Monitoring Technologies and Decision Aids for Health and Performance," Journal of Applied Physiology, vol. 124, no. 2, pp. 430--431, 2018.

[38]

O. Demasi, K. Kording, and B. Recht, "Meaningless comparisons lead to false optimism in medical machine learning," Plos One, vol. 12, no. 9, 2017.

[39]

S. Saeb, L. Lonini, A. Jayaraman, D. C. Mohr, and K. P. Kording, "Voodoo Machine Learning for Clinical Predictions," 2016.

[40]

S. Cohen, D. Janicki-Deverts, and G. E. Miller, "Psychological stress and disease," Jama, vol. 298, pp. 1685--1687, 2007.

[41]

K. A. Leger, S. T. Charles, N. A. Turiano, and D. M. Almeida, "Personality and stressor-related affect.," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 111, no. 6, pp. 917--928, 2016.

[42]

D. S. Black and G. M. Slavich, "Mindfulness meditation and the immune system: a systematic review of randomized controlled trials," Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 1373, no. 1, pp. 13--24, 2016.

[43]

T. Cunningham, "Measuring suffering," Intervention, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 19--27, 2015.

Cited By

KARACA A(2021)Yabancı Uyruklu Üniversite Öğrencilerine Yönelik Tutum Ölçeği’nin GeliştirilmesiDevelopment of Attitude Scale for Foreign Students at UniversitiesTürk Eğitim Bilimleri Dergisi10.37217/tebd.84755819:1(465-486)Online publication date: 25-Jun-2021
https://doi.org/10.37217/tebd.847558

Index Terms

The Psychophysiological Effects of Cross-Cultural Transaction in Foreign Students in Russia: a Pilot Study
1. Applied computing
  1. Life and medical sciences
    1. Health informatics

Recommendations

Biofeedback as a stress management tool: a systematic review

Inappropriate management of acute stress can negatively affect cognition and task performance. Frequently occurring acute stress encounters can lead to cardiovascular and immunity deficiencies, and psychological disorders such as depression, fatigue, ...
Regression analysis of facial thermal images for chronic stress estimation
Abstract
In recent years, the focus on mental health care in Japan has increased, leading to a rise in companies addressing employee mental well-being. Chronic stress, stemming from various sources including work and interpersonal relationships, can have ...
Russia: "national subjects" between unity and secession
EMESEG'10: Proceedings of the 3rd WSEAS international conference on Engineering mechanics, structures, engineering geology

After the implosion of communism in the USSR (1991) was a real disintegration of the Soviet space, which resulted in five sets geopolitical: Russian Federation, Baltic States, Eastern European States, States Transcaucasian and Central Asian States. In ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences

ICMHI '19: Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Medical and Health Informatics

May 2019

207 pages

ISBN:9781450371995

DOI:10.1145/3340037

Copyright © 2019 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

In-Cooperation

University of Electronic Science and Technology of China: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 17 May 2019

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article
Research
Refereed limited

Conference

ICMHI 2019

ICMHI 2019: The third International Conference on Medical and Health Informatics 2019

May 17 - 19, 2019

Xiamen, China

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

1
Total Citations
View Citations
57
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)4
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)3

Reflects downloads up to 05 Mar 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

KARACA A(2021)Yabancı Uyruklu Üniversite Öğrencilerine Yönelik Tutum Ölçeği’nin GeliştirilmesiDevelopment of Attitude Scale for Foreign Students at UniversitiesTürk Eğitim Bilimleri Dergisi10.37217/tebd.84755819:1(465-486)Online publication date: 25-Jun-2021
https://doi.org/10.37217/tebd.847558

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Figures

Tables

Media

View Table of Conten