Research suggests affective picture-viewing modulates subjective and physiological reactions to noxious stimulation (pain report, heart rate acceleration, skin conductance response, nociceptive flexion reflex). Because the nociceptive flexion reflex (a spinal reflex) is modulated by picture-viewing, this suggests affective processes are able to modulate afferent nociception at spinal levels. Th...

OBJECTIVE To verify differences in the visual scanning strategies between pervasive developmental disorders (PDD) and controls when they are observing social and non-social pictures. METHOD PDD group (PDDG) comprised by 10 non-retarded subjects (age from 4 to 41) and age-matched control group (CG). Nine social pictures with human beings (including two pictures of cat mask), and 3 nonsocial pi...

Bulimia nervosa (BN) and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) co-occur at greater rates than chance and may have shared mechanisms of dysfunction. One of these proposed mechanisms is a hyper-responsive aversive system as indicated by heightened startle response to aversive stimuli. The present study examined this hypothesis using 2 types of aversive stimuli: disorder specific (e.g., high-caloric...

Extensive evidence indicates that women outperform men in episodic memory tasks. Furthermore, women are known to evaluate emotional stimuli as more arousing than men. Because emotional arousal typically increases episodic memory formation, the females' memory advantage might be more pronounced for emotionally arousing information than for neutral information. Here, we report behavioral data fro...

There are many reasons why the gender imbalance in computing should be of concern to the profession. Over the last 20 years there have been many intervention programs which attempt to redress this situation and encourage more women into computing. To determine whether an intervention program has made a difference requires evaluation. Program evaluation is the careful collecting of information a...

Illustrated books hold a special place in children's early literacy development. However, blind children have little access to them and there is no guarantee that they can easily understand tactile pictures. There are several designs of illustrations, each leading different identification performances. Our study aimed compare three illustration two populations (36 blindfolded sighted 18 childre...

In some situations, memory is enhanced by stressful experience, while in others, it is impaired. The specific components of the stress-response that may result in these differing effects remain unclear, and the current study sought to address this knowledge gap. Forty healthy participants (20 women, 20 men) were exposed to emotionally arousing and neutral pictures. Twenty-four hours later, 20 p...

It has been shown that height is one of the morphological traits that influence a person's attractiveness. To date, few studies have addressed the relationship between different components of height and physical attractiveness. Here, we study how leg length influences attractiveness in men and women. Stimuli consisted of seven different pictures of a man and seven pictures of a woman in which t...