BACKGROUND Latent toxoplasmosis, a lifelong infection with the protozoan Toxoplasma gondii, has cumulative effects on the behaviour of hosts, including humans. The most impressive effect of toxoplasmosis is the "fatal attraction phenomenon," the conversion of innate fear of cat odour into attraction to cat odour in infected rodents. While most behavioural effects of toxoplasmosis were confirmed...

Eyeblinks, whether reflexive or voluntary, play an important role in protecting our vision. When viewing pictures, reflexive eyeblinks are known to be modulated by the emotional state induced thereby. More specifically, the hedonic valence (unpleasantness-pleasantness) induced by the picture has been shown to have a linear relationship with the amplitude of a startle blink elicited during pictu...

effects of inhaled essential oils (eos) cannot be explained by pharmacological mechanisms alone. the study aimed to investigate the effects of pleasantness of and expectancies evoked by eos. a double-blind experiment with a within-subject design was carried out with the participation of 33 volunteering adults (15.2% male; mean age 37.7 ± 10.90 years). participants were exposed to three eos (...

A judgment of leaning (JOL) has been investigated to understand self-regulated learning. However, asking participants make JOLs may increase memory by creating a reactivity effect. In two experiments, we examined whether making would enhance inducing item-specific processing. We compared JOL task with other tasks that are known induce processing: pleasantness rating (Experiment 1) and single im...

Taking a temporal perspective, we examined how employees' mood (i.e., wakefulness-tiredness, calmness-tenseness, and pleasantness-unpleasantness) develops during the workday tested daily recovery from work as predictor of these trajectories. Specifically, analysed serial mediation model with evening experiences psychological detachment, relaxation, mastery experiences, control) being indirectly...

Un-myelinated C tactile afferents (CT afferents) are a key finding in affective touch. These fibers, which activate in response to a caress-like touch to hairy skin (CT afferents are not found in palm skin), may have more in common with interoceptive systems encoding body ownership, than afferent systems processing other tactile stimuli. We tested whether subjective embodiment of a rubber hand ...

Complementary neurophysiological recordings in macaques and functional neuroimaging in humans show that the primary taste cortex in the rostral insula and adjoining frontal operculum provides separate and combined representations of the taste, temperature, and texture (including viscosity and fat texture) of food in the mouth independently of hunger and thus of reward value and pleasantness. On...

We investigated the contribution of hunger and food liking to food reward, and the relationship between food reward and food intake. We defined liking as the pleasantness of taste of food in the mouth, and food reward as the momentary value of a food to the individual at the time of ingestion. Liking and food reward were measured, respectively, by ratings of the pleasantness of the taste of a m...

To give residents better understanding of the impact future airport scenarios, a virtual reality application with sound simulation will be tested in frame European ANIMA project. The set-up has been evaluated laboratory before being used real situation. This paper presents experiment whose aim is to assess application's relevance for simulating flyovers. Although perceptual designed test influe...