The majority of present efforts to constrain cosmological parameters with cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy data employ approximate likelihood functions, the time consuming nature of a complete analysis being a major obstacle. We have performed a full (unapproximated) likelihood analysis on several experiments that allows us to examine the various assumptions made in these approximat...

Ventricular fibrillation is an incoordinated type of contraction which produces no useful beats. The typical rippling movements of the ventricular muscle are unmistakable when seen or felt with the hand directly on the heart. The treatment of a heart that has stopped is cardiac massage and adequate oxygenation. The treatment of ventricular fibrillation which we recommend is, first, massage to m...

Previous research shows that an 'angry face' conditioned stimulus will elicit conditioned skin conductance responses (SCR) after a small number of trials pairing it with a mild electric shock. Such conditioning occurs even with masked presentations of the facial stimulus. Furthermore, the Implicit Association Test (IAT) has been demonstrated to be sensitive to the presence of information proces...

Outlines 5 models of the temperature-aggression hypothesis: negative affect escape, simple negative affect, excitation transfer/misattribution, cognitive neoassociation, and physiological-thermoregulatory. Reviews relevant studies. Aggression measures include violent crime, spouse abuse, horn-honking, and delivery of electric shock. Analysis levels include geographic regional, seasonal, monthly...

How we make decisions that have direct consequences for ourselves and others forms the moral foundation of our society. Whereas economic theory contends that humans aim at maximizing their own gains, recent seminal psychological work suggests that our behavior is instead hyperaltruistic: We are more willing to sacrifice gains to spare others from harm than to spare ourselves from harm. To inves...

Male rats with a chronically implanted device that allowed photoelectric plethysmographic measures to be made of the stomach wall were trained while paralyzed with d-tubocurarine and being artificially respirated. One group was reinforced by avoidance of and/or escape from electric shocks to the tail, whenever increases in the transmission of light through the stomach wall occurred during a CS;...

The case of a pregnant woman suffering a large placental abruption following electric shock at 32 weeks' gestation is reported. No other such cases have been published in the literature.

The seahare Aplysia spp. extracts many of its defensive chemicals from its red seaweed diet, including its purple ink, which is an effective deterrent against predators such as anemones and crabs. It is believed that the inking behavior is a high-threshold, all-or-none fixed act that nearly completely depletes the seahare of its ink supply. If a seahare depletes its gland of ink, it must seek o...

The paper by Park and colleagues in the previous issue of Critical Care highlights vascular changes in electrical injury and finds them to be relatively long-lasting and significant. This finding is consistent with long-lasting disability seen clinically in electrically injured patients. Furthermore, the authors report that the changes seen in the shocked part of the body are accompanied by sim...

While the majority of previous studies assessing pain-related variables in psychopaths used electric shocks, little is known about the effectiveness of alternative pain-inducing methods to increase emotional responses such as fear and anxiety. A small sample of healthy undergraduate men (N = 15) was recruited to assess the effectiveness of a heat stimulus to induce pain in an immediate versus d...