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Tonic immobility (also known as the act of feigning death, or exhibiting thanatosis) is a behaviour in which some animals become apparently temporarily paralysed and unresponsive to external stimuli. Tonic immobility is most generally considered to be an anti-predator behavior because it occurs most often in response to an extreme threat such ...
Manifest functions are the consequences that people see, observe or even expect. It is explicitly stated and understood by the participants in the relevant action. The manifest function of a rain dance, according to Merton in his 1957 Social Theory and Social Structure, is to produce rain, and this outcome is intended and desired by people participating in the ritual.
Ioannis Tsoukalas of Stockholm University has hypothesized that REM sleep is an evolutionary transformation of a well-known defensive mechanism, the tonic immobility reflex. This reflex, also known as animal hypnosis or death feigning, functions as the last line of defense against an attacking predator and consists of the total immobilization ...
The term cataplexy originates from the Greek κατά (kata, meaning "down"), and πλῆξις (plēxis, meaning "strike") [4] and it was first used around 1880 in German physiology literature to describe the phenomenon of tonic immobility also known as "playing possum" (in reference to the opossum's behavior of feigning death when threatened ...
This drop in heart rate can last up to two minutes, causing the fawn to experience a depressed breathing rate and decrease in movement, called tonic immobility. Tonic immobility is a reflex response that causes the fawn to enter a low body position that simulates the position of a corpse.
Sudden prolonged immobility or faked death is an adaptive response exhibited by many mammalian species. Hofer(1970) demonstrated that several rodent species when threatened exhibited an immobility that was accompanied by a very low heart rate. For some of the rodents that heart rate reached below 50% of the baseline.
In human sexuality, paralysis, also known as rape paralysis, [1] involuntary paralysis, [2] fright (or faint), [3] [4] or tonic immobility, [1] [3] [5] is a natural bodily survival reaction which can be automatically activated by the brain of a person who feels threatened by sexual violence. During this paralysis, one cannot move and cannot say ...
Tonic in physiology refers to a physiological response which is slow and may be graded. This term is typically used in opposition to a fast response. For instance, tonic muscles are contrasted by the more typical and much faster twitch muscles, while tonic sensory nerve endings are contrasted to the much faster phasic sensory nerve endings.