This article describes a drinkometer circuit designed to (1) detect licks even if the resistance of the skin on the animal's feet becomes quite high due to low humidity, (2) automatically adjust its triggering threshold and increase its gain so that it will continue to detect licks when the water delivery spout is partially shorted to ground by high ambient humidity, (3) reject 60-Hz signals so...

This study investigates how obedience in a Milgram-like experiment is predicted by interindividual differences. Participants were 35 males and 31 females aged 26-54 from the general population who were contacted by phone 8 months after their participation in a study transposing Milgram's obedience paradigm to the context of a fake television game show. Interviews were presented as opinion polls...

This experiment confi rms and extends an earlier finding that a hungry rhesus monkey (0) will avoid securing food if this subjects another mon key (SA) to electric shock. In the present series this "sacrificial" behavior was manifested in 6 of 10 animals independently of the relative position of the two animals in a dominance hierarchy. It was also found that while prior shock of the 0 resulted...

Research based on event-related potential (ERP) reported mediofrontal negativities following unexpected negative feedback or performance error. Some authors proposed that these signals reflect reward prediction error for worse than expected outcomes, while others suggested that mediofrontal negativities express medial prefrontal cortex coding for unexpected non-occurrence of a predicted outcome...

A 4-interval forced-choice procedure was used to determine the detection threshold for electric shock in psychopathic and nonpsychopathic criminals. The use of a constant-current stimulator, a concentric electrode, and monitoring of the skin-electrode impedance permitted precise control over the characteristics of shock administered. The results indicated that the psychopathic Ss had a signific...

The majority of decision-related research has focused on how the brain computes decisions over outcomes that are positive in expectation. However, much less is known about how the brain integrates information when all possible outcomes in a decision are negative. To study decision-making over negative outcomes, we used fMRI along with a task in which participants had to accept or reject 50/50 l...

Attention can be captured automatically by events that are physically salient. Similarly, emotional stimuli are known to be prioritised by the visual system because of their behavioural significance. The present study investigated whether a neutral stimulus which became associated with fear captured attention in visual search. Using a fear-conditioning procedure, one stimulus was repeatedly com...