Previous research suggests that the Paced Auditory Serial Attention Task (PASAT) alters mood states, which may induce performance changes and complicate interpretation test scores. In the current design, we examined arousal as one mechanism moderating PASAT performance. It was expected that arousal level would increase during the test, and performance on the test would be related to arousal lev...

Arousal involves a physiological and psychological state of being awake or reactive to stimuli. It could be treated also as an energetic property of stimulation. On the basis of previous findings concerning affective state modulation of spatial processing, I predict that arousal impact will follow the Yerkes-Dodson law. To test this hypothesis, 135 words were chosen and divided into three level...

Changes in brain activity accompanying shifts in vigilance and arousal can interfere with the study of other intrinsic and task-evoked characteristics of brain function. However, the difficulty of tracking and modeling the arousal state during functional MRI (fMRI) typically precludes the assessment of arousal-dependent influences on fMRI signals. Here we combine fMRI, electrophysiology, and th...

Several studies have suggested that both affective valence and arousal affect the perception of time. However, in previous experiments, the two affective dimensions have not been systematically controlled. In this study, standardized photographic slides rated for emotional valence and arousal were projected to two groups of subjects for 2, 4, and 6 sec. One group of subjects estimated the proje...

PURPOSE OF REVIEW Standard neurorehabilitation approaches have limited impact on motor recovery in patients with severe brain injuries. Consideration of the contributions of impaired arousal offers a novel approach to understand and enhance recovery. RECENT FINDINGS Animal and human neuroimaging studies are elucidating the neuroanatomical bases of arousal and of arousal regulation, the proces...

Arousal-Biased Competition theory suggests that arousal enhances competitive attentional processes, but makes no strong claims about valence effects. Recent research suggests that the scope of enhanced attention depends on valence with negative arousal narrowing and positive arousal broadening attention. Attentional scope likely affects declarative-memorymediated and perceptual-representation-m...

The initial treatment for patients with acute mania represents a significant clinical challenge, given that treatments for mania symptom control usually take several days to start acting. Most treatments available for the manic phase of bipolar disorder are sedatives, to lower the hyperactivity and excitation that patients with mania present. However, recent observations indicate that these sym...

PURPOSE Our main aim was to determine the time interval between the seizure onsets and arousal-awakening related to these seizures in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) and to discuss the role of lateralization on arousal-awakening mechanisms. METHODS Thirty-three TLE patients who underwent video-EEG monitoring with simultaneous polysomnography (PSG) and had recorded nocturnal seizure...

INTRODUCTION Several studies have demonstrated that moderate exercise increases genital response to erotic stimuli in women. The increase in genital arousal could be the result of various changes that can occur in response to exercise including changes in hormone levels, neurotransmitter levels, mood, and autonomic nervous system activity. AIM The present study was an attempt to shed light on...

Prenatal exposure to cocaine, as well as other drugs, has been linked with "dysregulation," usually defined as problems in arousal and/or behavioral regulation. This study was designed to describe the physiological basis of dysregulation as a function of prenatal cocaine/polydrug exposure and term status. Eight-week-old infants were selected because they are just developing the ability to modul...