Our experience the world is dependent on both the surroundings and the brain. In other words, perception is a synthesis of incoming signals, internal state, and previous knowledge rather than a mere reflection of the environment. Prior knowledge can be engendered from cues in the present context, from previous experiences, or in a wider sense by evolutionary processes effected in the organizati...

OBJECTIVE When we evaluate the success of a hearing aid fitting, or the effectiveness of new amplification technology, self-report data occupy a position of critical importance. Unless patients report that our efforts are helpful, it is difficult to justify a conclusion that the intervention has been successful. Although it is generally assumed that subjective reports primarily reflect the exce...

D ecision making in the face of conflicting ethical demands has intrigued mankind for millennia. A long philosophical tradition has placed emphasis on reasoning, about utilitarian outcomes, for example, in such decisions (1). However, recent work in social neuroscience (2, 3) has identified brain circuits active during moral judgment that have been linked to prosocial emotions such as empathy, ...

Stressful situations, the aversiveness of events, or increases in task difficulty (e.g., conflict) have repeatedly been shown to be capable of triggering attentional control adjustments. In the present study we tested whether the particularity of an fMRI testing environment (i.e., EPI noise) might result in such increases of the cognitive control exerted. We found that participants were more ef...

A stressful nature of exposure to traffic congestion in automobile commuting has been demonstrated in previous quasi-experimental research that has been measurement-intensive but conducted with relatively small samples. The present study examined commuting stress in automobile travel with a large representative sample (N = 2591) in southern California through telephone survey° Commuting stress ...

Neural and behavioral evidence from diverse species indicates that some forms of pain may be generated by coordinated activity in networks far smaller than the cortical pain matrix in mammals. Studies on responses to injury in squid suggest that simplification of the circuitry necessary for conscious pain might be achieved by restricting awareness to very limited information about a noxious eve...

25 In humans, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) activity in the anterior cingulate 26 cortex (ACC) and the nucleus accumbens (NAc) appears to reflect affective and motivational 27 aspects of pain. The responses of this reward-aversion circuit to relief of pain, however, have 28 not been investigated in detail. Moreover, it is not clear whether brain processing of the 29 affective qua...

Since North Sea oil and gas (O&G) production started more than 40 years ago, over 1450 structures have been installed in the region (https://www.ospar.org/work-areas/oic/installations; Figure 1). As many of these offshore O&G are coming to end their operational lives across Sea, ecological roles regional marine environment remains be understood integrated assessment net environmental benefit di...

Past approaches to the self have emphasized people'^ desire for positive evaluations I suggest that this emphasis overlooks another powerful and important motive, the desire for evaluations that venfy self-views Among people with negative self-views, this desirt for self-venfication can override the desire for positive evaluations For example, people with negative self-views seek relationship p...

In this paper, we develop an externalist understanding of procrastination and, in particular, of our how our distributed will and its supportive social scaffolding enables us to keep procrastination in check (to the extent that we are able to). Thinking about procrastination in this way has several attractive implications. It provides an explanation of individuals’ ability to stave off procrast...