Preparing to Grasp Emotionally Laden Stimuli

Preparing to Grasp Emotionally Laden Stimuli

BACKGROUND Contemporary theories of motor control propose that motor planning involves the prediction of the consequences of actions. These predictions include the associated costs as well as the rewarding nature of movements' outcomes. Within the estimation of these costs and rewards would lie the valence, that is, the pleasantness or unpleasantness of a given stimulus with which one is about ...

Rapid Facial Reactions to Emotionally Relevant Stimuli

The effect of emotions and emotionally laden landmarks on wayfinding

Emotions have an influence on attention, decision making, and memory (all factors required for wayfinding). It is assumed that both an emotional state and emotionally laden landmarks have an impact on wayfinding and on later recollection of the path. We performed two experiments to investigate our hypotheses. First, in both experiments participants had to study a route in a virtual environment ...

Correlated Components of Ongoing EEG Point to Emotionally Laden Attention – A Possible Marker of Engagement?

Recent evidence from functional magnetic resonance imaging suggests that cortical hemodynamic responses coincide in different subjects experiencing a common naturalistic stimulus. Here we utilize neural responses in the electroencephalogram (EEG) evoked by multiple presentations of short film clips to index brain states marked by high levels of correlation within and across subjects. We formula...

Stress improves selective attention towards emotionally neutral left ear stimuli.

Research concerning the impact of psychological stress on visual selective attention has produced mixed results. The current paper describes two experiments which utilise a novel auditory oddball paradigm to test the impact of psychological stress on auditory selective attention. Participants had to report the location of emotionally-neutral auditory stimuli, while ignoring task-irrelevant chan...