The anterior insula (AI) plays a key role in affective processing, and insular dysfunction has been noted in several clinical conditions. Real-time functional MRI neurofeedback (rtfMRI-NF) provides a means of helping people learn to self-regulate activation in this brain region. Using the Blood Oxygenated Level Dependant (BOLD) signal from the right AI (RAI) as neurofeedback, we trained partici...

The recognition of affective human communication may be used to provide developers with a rich source of information for creating systems that are capable of interacting well with humans. Posture has been acknowledged as an important modality of affective communication in many fields. Behavioral studies have shown that posture can communicate discrete emotion categories as well as affective dim...

We examined the possible dissociation between two modes of valence: affective valence (valence of e emotional response) and semantic valence (stored knowledge about valence of an object or event). In Experiment 1, 50 participants viewed affective pictures that were repeatedly presented while their facial electromyography (EMG) activation and heart rate response were continuously recorded. Half ...

Affective primes may impact ensuing behavior through condition and person effects. However, previous research has not experimentally disentangled these two sources of influence in affective priming paradigms. In the current research, we simultaneously examine the influence of condition factors, in terms of prime valence, and person factors, in terms of affect reactivity and personality. In both...

Allocation of processing resources to emotional picture stimuli was examined using steady-state visual evoked brain potentials (ssVEPs). Participants viewed a set of 60 colored affective pictures from the International Affective Picture System, presented in a flickering mode at 10 Hz in order to elicit ssVEPs. Phase and amplitude of the 10-Hz ssVEP were examined for six picture categories: thre...

This study evaluated the association between neuropsychological indices of frontal lobe and right hemisphere impairment and deficits in the expression of affect in schizophrenia. The advantages of the present study were that unmedicated schizophrenia patients were studied and relevant demographic characteristics were controlled. Furthermore, deficits in affective expression were assessed both i...

The aim of this research was to study the influence of both the emotional content and the physical characteristics of affective stimuli on the psychophysiological, behavioral and cognitive indexes of the emotional response. We selected 54 pictures from the IAPS, depicting unpleasant, neutral, and pleasant contents, and used two picture sizes as experimental conditions (120 x 90 cm and 52 x 42 c...

The role of conscious cognitive processes in human affective conditioning remains controversial, with several theories arguing that such conditioning can occur without awareness of the conditioned stimulus (CS)-unconditioned stimulus (UCS) contingency. One specific type of affective conditioning in which unaware conditioning is said to occur is "evaluative conditioning." The present experiment ...

The proposal that affective learning, the learning of likes and dislikes, can exist in the absence of contingency awareness, whereas signal learning, the learning of stimulus relationships, cannot, was investigated in a differential conditioning paradigm that was embedded in a visual masking task. Startle magnitude modulation and changes in verbal ratings served as measures of affective learnin...