Behavioral theory posits that certain environmental changes and avoidant behaviors inhibit individuals from experiencing environmental reward and reinforcement and subsequently leads to the development and maintenance of depressive symptoms. Using self-report and behavioral (daily diary) indices of environmental reward as proxy measures for positive reinforcement, this investigation examined wh...

Fear inhibits food intake. Cessation of eating in anticipation of danger is an adaptive response that prepares an organism for an imminent threat, but it could become maladaptive when persistent. To begin to examine the underlying mechanisms, we developed an animal model for fear-cue induced inhibition of feeding. In that preparation, food-deprived rats stop eating when presented with a tone th...

Electrolytic lesions of the medial prefrontal cortex (PFCX) were examined using fear conditioning to assess the recall of fear extinction and performance in the Y-maze, open field, and object location/recognition in male and female Sprague-Dawley rats. Rats were conditioned to seven tone/footshocks, followed by extinction after 1-h and 24-h delays, revealing PFCX effects and sex differences dur...

Evolutionary selection pressures have been one of the factors proposed to underlie sex differences in inhibitory control. Consequently, inhibitory control may vary as a function of the menstrual cycle and may be modulated by the stimuli being processed if these stimuli are related to reproductive success. We used functional MRI to study women's brain activation across the menstrual cycle on a G...

Psychological impotence or erectile dysfunction is nowadays a pretty common yet misunderstood disorder. People often cannot detect it properly and misunderstood it for physical impotence. Psychological impotence is basically caused by psychological problems. Most of the times, this kind of impotence are curable. Recent study has shown that most of the cases of impotence are basically of this na...

Classic ecological theory predicts that the evolution of sexual dimorphism constrains diversification by limiting morphospace available for speciation. Alternatively, sexual selection may lead to the evolution of reproductive isolation and increased diversification. We test contrasting predictions of these hypotheses by examining the relationship between sexual dimorphism and diversification in...

BACKGROUND Younger age and female sex are both associated with greater mental stress in the general population, but limited data exist on the status of perceived stress in young and middle-aged patients presenting with acute myocardial infarction. METHODS AND RESULTS We examined sex difference in stress, contributing factors to this difference, and whether this difference helps explain sex-ba...

Evolutionary psychologists argue that human nature contains many discrete psychological adaptations. Each adaptation is theorized to have been functional in humans' ancestral past, and empirical evidence that an attribute is an adaptation can come from showing it possesses complexity, efficiency, universality, and other features of special design. In this article, we present a tutorial review o...

Choice viewing behavior when looking at affective scenes was assessed to examine differences due to hedonic content and gender by monitoring eye movements in a selective looking paradigm. On each trial, participants viewed a pair of pictures that included a neutral picture together with an affective scene depicting either contamination, mutilation, threat, food, nude males, or nude females. The...

Ideology is the source of all organized activity—there is no possibility of organized social activity without an internalized morality or ideology to legitimate it. Indeed, ideology is the transcendent phenomenon of everyday life, not as the causal or motivating factor in social activity, but as the link between organized mental activity and the organized social world. Ideology serves to legiti...