BACKGROUND Psychopathy is a complex personality disorder of unknown etiology. Central to the disorder are anomalies or difficulties in affective processing. METHODS Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to elucidate the neurobiological correlates of these anomalies in criminal psychopaths during performance of an affective memory task. RESULTS Compared with criminal nonpsychopaths ...

BACKGROUND Desktop virtual environments (VEs) are increasingly deployed to study the effects of environmental qualities and interventions on human behavior and safety related concerns in built environments. For these applications it is essential that users appraise the affective qualities of the VE similar to those of its real world counterpart. Previous studies have shown that factors like sim...

Upcoming responses in the second of two subsequently performed tasks can speed up compatible responses in the temporally preceding first task. Two experiments extend previous demonstration of such backward compatibility to affective features: responses to affective stimuli were faster in Task 1 when an affectively compatible response effect was anticipated for Task 2. This emotional backward-co...

We report the results of a randomized controlled evaluation of the effectiveness of pedagogical agents as providers of affective feedback. These digital learning companions were embedded in an intelligent tutoring system for mathematics, and were used by approximately one hundred students in two public high schools. Students in the control group did not receive the learning companions. Results ...

In the present article, we introduce the Nencki Affective Word List (NAWL), created in order to provide researchers with a database of 2,902 Polish words, including nouns, verbs, and adjectives, with ratings of emotional valence, arousal, and imageability. Measures of several objective psycholinguistic features of the words (frequency, grammatical class, and number of letters) are also controll...

Perceptual judgements and acoustic analyses of affective prosody during sentence repetition were examined in four patients with transcortical aphasias and in two normal controls. Although all aphasic patients had a relative preservation of sentence repetition, perceptual ratings revealed that they repeated using correct affective intonation significantly less frequently than normal control subj...

The present study shows how motor expertise increases individuals' sensitivity to others' affective body movement. This enhanced sensitivity is evident in the experts' behavior and physiology. Nineteen affective movement experts (professional ballet dancers) and 24 controls watched 96 video clips of emotionally expressive body movements while they performed an affect rating task (subjective res...

OBJECTIVE To identify independent risk factors for affective disorders in temporal lobe epilepsy. METHODS We studied 97 patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) exploring variables like age, gender, family history of epilepsy and psychiatric disorders, duration of epilepsy, control of seizures, presence of aura and initial precipitant insult, abuse of substances, neuroimaging and EEG featur...

Building on self-determination theory (Deci and Ryan in Psychological Inquiry, 11, 227-268. doi: 10.1207/S15327965PLI1104_01 , 2000), the aim of the current study was to examine the role of maternal affective and cognitive empathy in predicting adolescents' depressive symptoms, through mothers' psychological control use. Less empathic mothers may be less sensitive to adolescents' need for psych...