Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to investigate hemodynamic responses to adjectives pronounced in happy and angry intonations of varying emotional intensity. In separate sessions, participants judged the emotional valence of either intonation or semantics. To disentangle effects of emotional prosodic intensity from confounding acoustic parameters, mean and variability of volume an...

Emotionally arousing material is typically better remembered than neutral material. Since norepinephrine and cortisol interact to modulate emotional memory, sex-related influences on stress responses may be related to sex differences in emotional memory. Two groups of healthy women - one naturally cycling (NC women, n=42) and one using hormonal contraceptives (HC women, n=36) - viewed emotional...

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of thoracic spinal cord neurons was used to examine the neural correlates of visceral emotional responses. Participants completed four spinal fMRI runs involving passive viewing (i.e. no movement) and motoric responses to negative or neutral images. Negative images, particularly in the movement condition, elicited robust activity in motoric nuclei, i...

Previous research has demonstrated that emotional stimuli receive preferential processing in the brain. In the current study, functional magnetic resonance imaging was utilized to determine if emotion-specific responses are detectable in the cervical spinal cord. During the passive (i.e., non-motoric) perception of images, activity was detected in the left dorsal and right ventral spinal cord i...

The identification of the cannabinoid receptor type 1 (CB1 receptor) was the milestone discovery in the elucidation of the behavioural and emotional responses induced by the Cannabis sativa constituent Delta(9)-tetrahydrocannabinol. The subsequent years have established the existence of the endocannabinoid system. The early view relating this system to emotional responses is reflected by the fa...

Along with a growing interest in emotional design and pleasurable products, it is necessary to understand how designers are able to maintain emotional impacts of their design solutions throughout the design process, and how these solutions can find a way to evoke the intended emotional feeling of the users. The present study first examined emotional responses to early design sketches, and how t...

In this article, we investigated the expression of emotional responses to the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake by analyzing the frequency of negative emotional terms in tweets posted on Twitter, one of the most popular social media platforms. We focused on differences in time-series variations and diurnal changes between two kinds of disasters: natural disasters (earthquakes and tsunamis) and n...

Selective attention plays a fundamental role in emotion regulation. To date, research has examined individuals' use of selective attention to regulate emotional responses during stimulus presentation. In the present study, we examined whether selective attention can be used to regulate emotional responses during a poststimulus period when representations are active within working memory (WM). O...