It has been suggested that empathy leads to altruistic rather than egoistic motivation to help. This hypothesis was tested by having subjects watch another female undergraduate receive electric shocks and then giving them a chance to help her by taking the remaining shocks themselves. In each of two experiments, subjects' level of empathic emotion (low versus high) and their ease of escape from...

Four experiments examined motivational effects of response-contingent electric shocks on action initiation. Although the shock was unambiguously aversive for the individual in line with subjective and functional criteria, results showed that the shock-producing action was initiated faster relative to a response producing no shock. However, no facilitation effect was found when strong shocks wer...

In this paper, a grounding capacitance multiplier is presented. This block is very important because he presents a better solution to resolve the problems occured by the integration of high capacitance value or the problem of tuning that value of the capacitance. We emphasize the fact that the presented applications are well suited for integration since their value can be tuned by simple action...

Electrocardiography has played an important role in the detection and characterization of heart function, both in normal and abnormal states. In this paper we present an inhomogeneous, anisotropic computer model of the human thorax for use in electrocardiography with emphasis on the calculation of transthoracic potential and current distributions. Knowledge of the current pathways in the thorax...

The procedure described here involves training an animal to make steady contact with a reward spout in order to receive food or water and then pairing a stimulus with mild electric shock delivered through the spout. The animal quickly learns to avoid the shock by breaking contact with the spout whenever it detects the stimulus. The breaking of contact with the spout is then used to indicate tha...

Successful defibrillation depends on delivery of adequate electrical current to the heart; one of the major determinants of current flow is transthoracic resistance (TTR). To study the factors influencing ITR, we prospectively collected data from 44 patients undergoing emergency defibrillation. Shocks of94-450 J delivered energy were administered from specially calibrated Datascope defibrillato...

Insulator-based dielectrophoresis (iDEP) was utilized to separate and concentrate selectively mixtures of two species of live bacteria simultaneously. Four species of bacteria were studied: the Gram-negative Escherichia coli and the Gram-positive Bacillus subtilis, B. cereus, and B. megaterium. Under an applied direct current (DC) electric field all the bacterial species exhibited negative diel...

Fine temporal patterns of firing in much of the brain are highly irregular. In some circuits, the precise pattern of irregularity contains information beyond that contained in mean firing rates. However, the capacity of neural circuits to use this additional information for computational purposes is not well understood. Here we employ computational methods to show that an ensemble of neurons fi...

BACKGROUND Pain induced by electrical stimuli has been found in previous research to be reduced by brief, weak electrical pulses, termed prepulses, presented 40 to 60ms prior to the painful electrical stimulus. METHODS The present experiment investigated the generality of this effect by presenting weak acoustic stimuli simultaneously with, or 80 or 1000ms prior to, painful electric shocks. In...