Three experiments supported the idea that alcohol fosters sexual risk-taking in men and women, in part, through its effects on sexual arousal. In Experiment 1, increasing alcohol dosage (target blood alcohol levels of .00, .04, .08%) heightened men's and women's risk-taking intentions. Alcohol's effect was indirect via increased subjective sexual arousal; also, men exhibited greater risk-taking...

Much is known about the effect of negative arousal on decision making, but little is known about the effect of positive arousal. In this study, we manipulated positive arousal and measured individual choices under risk using an incentivized task. Participants were randomly assigned to either a low arousal or a high arousal condition and asked to choose between pairs of two-outcome monetary lott...

Incidental memory performance for pictures that varied along the affective dimensions of pleasantness and arousal was assessed. For both an immediate and delayed (1 year later) free-recall task, only the arousal dimension had a stable effect on memory performance: Pictures rated as highly arousing were remembered better than low-arousal stimuli. This effect was corroborated in a speeded recogni...

In this fMRI study, we looked for the regions supporting interaction between cortical arousal and attention during three conditions: detection, observation, and rest. Arousal measurements were obtained from the EEG low-frequency (LF) power (5-9.5 Hz) recorded continuously together with fMRI. Whatever the condition, arousal was positively correlated with the fMRI signal of the right dorsal-later...

Alterations in arousal states are associated with multiple neuropsychiatric disorders, including generalized anxiety disorders, addiction, schizophrenia, and depression. Therefore, elucidating the neurobiological mechanisms controlling the boundaries between arousal, hyperarousal, and hypoarousal is a crucial endeavor in biological psychiatry. Substantial research over several decades has ident...

Models of affect assume a two-dimensional framework, composed of emotional valence and arousal. Although neuroimaging evidence supports a neuro-functional distinction of their effects during single word processing, electrophysiological studies have not yet compared the effects of arousal within the same category of valence (positive and negative). Here we investigate effects of arousal and vale...

Our state of arousal fluctuates from moment to moment-fluctuations that can have profound impacts on behavior. Arousal has been proposed to play a powerful, widespread role in the brain, influencing processes as far ranging as perception, memory, learning, and decision making. Although arousal clearly plays a critical role in modulating behavior, the mechanisms underlying this modulation remain...

It has been well established that moderate physiological or emotional arousal modulates memory. However, there is some controversy about whether the source of arousal must be semantically related to the information to be remembered. To test this idea, 35 healthy young adult participants learned a list of common nouns and afterward viewed a semantically unrelated, neutral or emotionally arousing...