Despite its pervasiveness in popular culture, there remains much to be learned about the psychological and physiological processes that underlie our experience of humor. In the present study, we examined the temporal profile of verbal humor elicitation using psychophysiological measures of heart rate (HR) and facial electromyography (EMG). Consistent with recent prior research on cardiovascular...

In a variety of organisms, adulthood is divided into aging and late life, where aging is a period of exponentially increasing mortality rates and late life is a period of roughly plateaued mortality rates. In this study we used ∼57,600 Drosophila melanogaster from six replicate populations to examine the physiological transitions from aging to late life in four functional characters that declin...

Background: Electronic fetal monitoring was used in many hospitals before labor and during delivery . The objective of this study was to investigate whether the use of fetal monitoring had effect on neonatal outcomes and cesarean section rate. Materials and Methods: A prospective study on monitoring neonatal Apgar and kind of delivery data, from deliveries occurring at Shahid Sadughi hospital i...

Successful learning hinges on the evaluation of positive and negative feedback. We assessed differential learning from reward and punishment in a monetary reinforcement learning paradigm, together with cardiac concomitants of positive and negative feedback processing. On the behavioral level, learning from reward resulted in more advantageous behavior than learning from punishment, suggesting a...

Recent studies indicate that dual tasks can be performed with a serial or parallel strategy and that the parallel strategy is preferred even if this implies performance costs. The present study investigates the hypothesis that parallel processing is favored because it requires less mental effort compared to serial processing. A serial or parallel processing strategy was induced in a sample of 2...

The geometry of the Poincaré plot of RR intervals is considered and its basic descriptors are defined in terms of the second moment of a distribution of points in a plane. One of the standard descriptors, SD1, is redefined and used to define two new descriptors, SD1(UP) and SD1(DOWN), whose squares partition SD1(2) (the variance corresponding to short-term heart rate variability) into contribut...

The current study investigated spontaneous anger coping, cardiac autonomic regulation and phasic heart rate responses to anger provocation. Forty-five adolescents (27 female, mean age 14.7 years) attended the single experimental session, which included monitoring of continuous heart rate and blood pressure responses to anger provocation (receiving an unfair offer) using a modified version of th...

We examined if emotional faces elicit physiological responses similar to pictures of emotional scenes. Forty one students viewed emotional scenes (negative, neutral, and positive) and emotional faces (angry, neutral, and happy). Heart rate, orbicularis oculi and electrodermal activity were measured continuously, and the startle reflex was elicited. Although the patterns of valence and arousal r...

P ower is determined from work per unit of time and considered to be a fundamental aspect of successful athletic performance, especially in sports that require speed, agility, and explosive actions (7, 17, 27, 39). Consequently the optimal training techniques to maximize power and the transfer of power to athletic performance have received considerable attention from researchers and sport condi...