To study affect regulation in adults with unipolar (n=38) and bipolar (n=38) forms of childhood-onset depression (COD), as compared with adults with no history of psychiatric illness (n=60), we examined affective modulation of the startle eyeblink reflex. Participants were subjected to binaural bursts of white noise while viewing pictures designed to elicit pleasant, neutral, or unpleasant affe...

INTRODUCTION "Theory of Mind" (ToM), i.e., the ability to infer other persons' mental states, is a key function of social cognition. It is increasingly recognized to form a multidimensional construct. One differentiation that has been proposed is that between cognitive and affective ToM, whose neural correlates remain to be identified. We aimed to ascertain the possible role of the right dorsol...

Evidence indicates meditation facilitates affective regulation and reduces negative affect. It also influences resting-state functional connectivity between affective networks and the posterior cingulate (PCC)/precuneus, regions critically implicated in self-referential processing. However, no longitudinal study employing active control group has examined the effect of meditation training on af...

Theory of Mind (ToM) is the ability to attribute thoughts, intentions and beliefs to others. This involves component processes, including cognitive perspective taking (cognitive ToM) and understanding emotions (affective ToM). This study assessed the distinction and overlap of neural processes involved in these respective components, and also investigated their development between adolescence a...

CONTEXT Reduced neural responses to others' distress is hypothesized to play a critical role in conduct problems coupled with callous-unemotional traits, whereas increased neural responses to affective stimuli may accompany conduct problems without callous-unemotional traits. Heterogeneity of affective profiles in conduct problems may account for inconsistent neuroimaging findings in this popul...

A novel affect-sensitive human-robot cooperative framework is presented in this paper. Peripheral physiological indices are measured through wearable biofeedback sensors to detect the affective state of the human. Affect recognition is performed through both quantitative and qualitative analyses. A subsumption control architecture sensitive to the affective state of the human is proposed for a ...

Background Infertility is a factor which has been linked to higher prevalence of sexual dysfunctions in women; however, ambiguous results have been reported about the impact of infertility on women’s sexual satisfaction. The purpose of this study was to compare sexual and dyadic functioning in infertile and fertile women. Furthermore, the associations between sexual variables and clinical varia...

Most studies on affective analysis of text focus on the sentiment or emotion expressed by a whole sentence or document. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to predict the affective states of a described event through the predictions of the corresponding subject, action and object involved in the described event. Rather than using a sentiment label or discrete emotion categories, the affe...

BACKGROUND Disturbances related to the arachidonic acid cascade and prostaglandin metabolism may be involved in the pathophysiology of bipolar disorder, as supported by a recent genome-wide association study meta-analysis; however, evidence from clinical studies on a transcriptional level is lacking. Two enzymes in the arachidonic acid cascade are the prostaglandin D synthase (PTGDS), which cat...