Prenatal alcohol exposure (PAE) can lead to life-long neurobehavioral and social problems that can include a greater likelihood of early use and/or abuse of alcohol compared to older teens and young adults without PAE. Basic research in animals demonstrates that PAE influences later postnatal responses to chemosensory cues (i.e., odor & taste) associated with alcohol. We hypothesized that PAE w...

Processing bias is an important feature of substance abuse. The issue whether processing bias is a more or less permanent feature of nicotine addiction remains to be resolved. The present study addresses the role of smoking status on smoking-related processing bias. We employed Event-Related Brain Potentials (ERPs) as measure of processing bias to investigate this issue. Further, self-report me...

Animal research has shown it is possible to want a reward that is not liked once obtained. Although these findings have elicited interest, human experiments have produced contradictory results, raising doubts about the existence of separate wanting and liking influences in human reward processing. This discrepancy could be due to inconsistences in the operationalization of these concepts. We sy...

People from varied cultural backgrounds differ in their attention to particular aspects of emotional cues. Whereas semantic content explicitly expresses feelings, vocal tone conveys implicit information regarding emotions. This study examined the attention to different emotional cues in European-American and Chinese children. Participants were 121 EuropeanAmerican and 120 Chinese children (4-9 ...

The judgment of pleasantness/unpleasantness is the prominent reaction to the olfactory world. In human adults, the hedonic valence of odor perception is affected by various factors, among which is an individual's lexical knowledge about smells. The present study examined whether such top-down effects of lexical knowledge on hedonic judgment of olfactory input are similar in children (5-6 years)...

A survey study examining the relative importance of various social and physical traits in heterosexual attraction was conducted. Data from 198 male and female heterosexual college students revealed that women ranked body odor as more important for attraction than ‘‘looks’’ or any social factor except ‘‘pleasantness.’’ Moreover, in contrast to response to fragrance use, liking someone’s natural ...

To examine the sensory effects of extreme sodium depletion in humans, 10 normal volunteers were fed a very-low-sodium diet and were treated with diuretics for 10 d. Urine samples were collected and blood was drawn for hormone analyses. Taste tests included threshold and intensity judgments of salt (NaCl) and sucrose and preferences for salt and sucrose in foods. Subjects also rated the pleasant...

The pleasantness of taste powerfully influences the preference for food and fluids. Particularly palatable tastes can lead to considerable overconsumption. Because palatable foods and fluids are potentially nutritive, animals are highly motivated to ingest them. The brain regions along the taste pathway and its anatomical interfacing with the brain reward system are thought to be involved in pa...

Emotions have a strong influence on the perception of visual and auditory stimuli. Only little is known about the relation between emotional stimulation and olfactory functions. The present study investigated the relationship between the presentation of affective pictures, olfactory functions, and sex. Olfactory performance was assessed in 32 subjects (16 male). Olfactory sensitivity was signif...

Two induction methods, Bányai, Zseni and Túry (1993) Active-Alert method, and Capafons’ Waking-Alert (alert hand) method (1998a) were used to investigate the role of induction method in predicting test suggestion responses. The results of this study demonstrate that a) responses to the intra-hypnotic suggestions of the Active-Alert hypnotic inductions predict the pleasantness of the methods, b)...