This paper examines the importance of medical electricity in Georgian England, the contexts and rationale for the use of electrical treatments, and the relationship between medical electricity and natural philosophy. It focuses upon the application of medical electricity by thephysician andnatural philosopherErasmusDarwin, and the role of electricity in his philosophy and psychophysiology. The ...

The behavioral significance of changes in the cardiovascular system has been a major source of controversy in psychophysiology. In view of this, it is surprising that so few studies have examined the relationship between cardiac events and electrocortical (EEG) activity in human subjects. In the present study, this relationship was examined by comparing phase, amplitude and frequency of EEG act...

It is a common experience-and well established experimentally-that music can engage us emotionally in a compelling manner. The mechanisms underlying these experiences are receiving increasing scrutiny. However, the extent to which other domains of aesthetic experience can similarly elicit strong emotions is unknown. Using psychophysiology, neuroimaging and behavioral responses, we show that rec...

Since its discovery in 1920, the electroencephalogram (EEG) has become a widely used tool in experimental psychology. Although originally the merits of the method were seen first of all in an improvement of medical diagnostics it was soon understood by psychologists that EEG can also be used to study psychic processes in healthy participants. This article summarizes important events in the hist...

Neuroscientific research has consistently found that the perception of an affective state in another activates the observer's own neural substrates for the corresponding state, which is likely the neural mechanism for "true empathy." However, to date there has not been a brain-imaging investigation of so-called "cognitive empathy", whereby one "actively projects oneself into the shoes of anothe...

Since the early days of physiological psychology it has been recognized that the behavioral effects of many manipulations often could not easily be attributed to impairments in learning because of possible changes in performance. Current psychopharmacological research concerned with evaluating the possible role of dopamine in reward-related learning is faced with the same problem. It is well kn...

In a recent article the principles of and the recommended practices for rescaling scalp-recorded electrophysiological data were submitted to a comprehensive review [Urbach, T.P., Kutas, M., 2002. The intractability of scaling scalp distributions to infer neuroelectric sources. Psychophysiology 39, 791-808]. The authors argued, on both conceptual and pragmatic grounds, that the practice of resca...