The procedure described here involves training an animal to make steady contact with a reward spout in order to receive food or water and then pairing a stimulus with mild electric shock delivered through the spout. The animal quickly learns to avoid the shock by breaking contact with the spout whenever it detects the stimulus. The breaking of contact with the spout is then used to indicate tha...

Successful defibrillation depends on delivery of adequate electrical current to the heart; one of the major determinants of current flow is transthoracic resistance (TTR). To study the factors influencing ITR, we prospectively collected data from 44 patients undergoing emergency defibrillation. Shocks of94-450 J delivered energy were administered from specially calibrated Datascope defibrillato...

Insulator-based dielectrophoresis (iDEP) was utilized to separate and concentrate selectively mixtures of two species of live bacteria simultaneously. Four species of bacteria were studied: the Gram-negative Escherichia coli and the Gram-positive Bacillus subtilis, B. cereus, and B. megaterium. Under an applied direct current (DC) electric field all the bacterial species exhibited negative diel...

Fine temporal patterns of firing in much of the brain are highly irregular. In some circuits, the precise pattern of irregularity contains information beyond that contained in mean firing rates. However, the capacity of neural circuits to use this additional information for computational purposes is not well understood. Here we employ computational methods to show that an ensemble of neurons fi...

BACKGROUND Pain induced by electrical stimuli has been found in previous research to be reduced by brief, weak electrical pulses, termed prepulses, presented 40 to 60ms prior to the painful electrical stimulus. METHODS The present experiment investigated the generality of this effect by presenting weak acoustic stimuli simultaneously with, or 80 or 1000ms prior to, painful electric shocks. In...

Normal Drosophilia learn to avoid an odorant associated with electric shock. An X-linked mutant, dunce, has been isolated that fails to display this learning in spite of being able to sense the odorant and electric shock and showing essentially normal behavior in other respects.

Do people sometimes seek to atone for their transgressions by harming themselves physically? The current results suggest that they do. People who wrote about a past guilt-inducing event inflicted more intense electric shocks on themselves than did those who wrote about feeling sad or about a neutral event. Moreover, the stronger the shocks that guilty participants administered to themselves, th...

In a recent, discussion of approach-avoidance conflict theory, Miller (1959) assumed that the strength or excitatory potential of the approach response should vary with factors which have been found to affect performance in nonconflict situations, namely: (1) the number of reinforced trials, (2) the strength of drive motivating the approach response, (3) the delay of reward, and (4) the amount ...

Each of eight rats was located in the experimental chamber mounted with two levers. Lever-pressing to either of the two was maintained by a schedule of food. After that, a punishment schedule of electric shocks was added. Neither the reinforcement nor the punishment schedule was programmed on the other lever, i.e. the non-reinforced alternative. The effect of reinforcement, and the joint effect...