In three previous studies, most subjects who anticipated having to perform an unpleasant task (e.g., eat a worm) and who were then offered a choice of that or a neutral task chose the unpleasant task. It was hypothesized that this "choosing to suffer" effect was produced by the subjects' attempt to make sense of their anticipated suffering, through one of three kinds of change in their concepti...

The purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that state anxiety operates as moderator of the alcohol-aggression relation. Participants were 80 healthy male social drinkers between 21 and 33 years of age. They were randomly assigned to 1 of 4 groups: (a) alcohol + anxiety induction (n = 20), (b) placebo + anxiety induction (n = 20), (c) alcohol + no anxiety induction (n = 20), and (d) pl...

In measuring reaction time (RT) to simultaneously presented stimuli, Todd (1912) found facilitation when sound and electric shock were paired but no effect when light was paired with either sound or shock. These results may be understood using the scheme suggested by Hilgard (1933) to account for facilitation of the eyeblink reflex. Hilgard used light and sound stimuli slightly offset in time a...

We examined influence of the beta-amyloid peptide (betaAP) (25-35) neurotoxic fragment on Helix lucorum food-aversion learning. Testing with aversively conditioned carrot showed that 2, 5 and 14 days after training the betaAP-injected group responded in a significantly larger number of cases and with a significantly smaller latency than the sham-injected control group. The results demonstrate t...

This article analyzes reports and data from the investigation of severe and fatal work-related accidents by the Regional Institute of Criminology in Piracicaba, São Paulo State, Brazil. Some 71 accident investigation reports were analyzed from 1998, 1999, and 2000. Accidents involving machinery represented 38.0% of the total, followed by high falls (15.5%), and electric shocks (11.3%). The repo...

AIM Existing models of myocardial membrane kinetics have not been able to reproduce the experimentally-observed negative bias in the asymmetry of transmembrane potential changes (DeltaV(m)) induced by strong electric shocks. The goals of this study are (1) to demonstrate that this negative bias could be reproduced by the addition, to the membrane model, of electroporation and an outward current...

When people are presented with backward-masked images of fear-relevant stimuli and only some of these images are paired consistently with electric shocks, they can predict the occurrence of shocks even though they do not consciously know which images they have seen. We postulated that they may use the perception of visceral cues from the conditional fear response to facilitate the prediction of...

Recent research on children’s word learning has led to a paradox. Although word learning appears to be a deep source of insight into conceptual knowledge for children, preschoolers often categorize objects on the basis of shallow perceptual features such as shape. The current studies seek to resolve this discrepancy. We suggest that comparing multiple instances of a category enables children to...

This study aimed to develop an equipment and system of resistance exercise (RE), based on squat-type exercise for rodents, with control of training variables. We developed an operant conditioning system composed of sound, light and feeding devices that allowed optimized RE performance by the animal. With this system, it is not necessary to impose fasting or electric shock for the animal to perf...

Frustration is an emotional state produced by the surprising omission in quantity and/or quality of an appetitive reinforcer. The aversive properties of stressors, such as electric shocks, produce responses similar to those elicited by a state of frustration. In this set of three experiments, we assessed the effects of water immersion (WIM, in Experiment 1)--that is, a physical stressor--and fi...