Stress

In a more perfect world, in a world where sanity and the pursuit of happiness were held more sacred, every neighborhood supermarket would have a Bart Berens. It would be part of the health code. Required by law as essential to physical fitness and the requisite mellowness needed while shopping. Sadly, however, Berens' talent is available only in a health food store. Like sun-dried macrobiotic seaweed, tofu hot dogs and wheatgrass juice, his craft is not quite ready for the mainstream at Ralphs.

"I felt like an emotional sponge, wrung out, with nothing left but still being squeezed." That's how psychologist Gary Kaplan describes the way he felt back when he was treating patients, before he switched a decade ago to teaching at San Francisco State University. It's called burnout, the debilitating physical and emotional overload that stems from stress on the job.

Think of the sequestered O.J. Simpson jury as a group of complete strangers set adrift without a captain or a navigator. They're like the thirsty and starving survivors in the old Alfred Hitchcock movie "Lifeboat." But instead of fighting over scraps of food and drops of water, they battle over what television programs to watch, or how long they are permitted to shop at Ross Dress for Less. Race, occupation, age and outlook on life mark sharp divisions among the 12 jurors and six alternates.

They whined. They cried. They collapsed on the floor in blubbering little emotional puddles--and Mom often joined right in. "The best-case scenario was that if I had had a fairly decent day and I wasn't exhausted, it was just me doing a whole lot of talking and cajoling to get us through the situation," says Janine Fiddelke of Brea, whose boys are 3 1/2 and 1. "On the worst days it was kids throwing temper tantrums and crying.

The parents, their young firmly in hand, gathered not long after dawn outside the Alexandria Avenue School, waiting for the buses to pick up the children. It is a daily ritual, time-honored in this new-immigrant enclave west of downtown, where overcrowded and aging schools like Alexandria cannot accommodate the burgeoning youthful population.

A new study says female nurses who worked irregular shifts for more than six years were up to 70% more likely than co-workers to suffer a heart attack. The study, in today's issue of the American Heart Assn. journal Circulation, was done by a team at Harvard Medical School and written by Dr. Ichiro Kawachi, an assistant professor of medicine. "Shift work is a type of stress," he said. "If you disrupt the body's daily biological clock, the body responds by pouring out stress-related hormones . .

Tourists in Antarctica are stressing penguins to death, contend two researchers at the Institute of Oceanography in Kiel, Germany. When Boris Culik and Rory Wilson attached sensors to several penguins a few years ago, they found that the birds' hearts pounded more quickly as humans passed by. That may have caused the 10%-20% fall in the population of two penguin species, they said.

The USC School of Social Work in South-Central Los Angeles needs to know how to best help Latinas who must care for friends or relatives with AIDS. They're even willing to pay. In exchange for agreeing to a confidential interview to discuss what kinds of services would most help those who take care of people with AIDS, the school will pay Latinas $20.

Prospective police officers routinely go through a battery of tests that check on psychological tendencies, financial stability, marital status, past brushes with the law, even how they get along with their neighbors. But police experts say that no amount of testing can predict whether an officer will turn to a life of crime. "You still might not know who you are getting," said Fullerton forensic psychiatrist Bruce Danto, who counsels officers from the Los Angeles Police Department.

Many parents become concerned when they notice their children start to suck their thumbs, bite their nails or twirl their hair, fearing the innocent act will become a hard-to-break habit. But experts say parents need not be troubled unless such behaviors become a reflex act for the way a child responds to stress. These acts might begin by accident, such as an infant finding a thumb to suck on, and then continue because it is pleasurable or comforting.