Sexual arousal is a motivational state that moves humans toward situations that inherently pose a risk of disease transmission. Disgust is an emotion that adaptively moves humans away from such situations. Incongruent is the fact that sexual activity is elementary to human fitness yet involves strong disgust elicitors. Using an experimental paradigm, we investigated how these two states interac...

Emotionally arousing pictures induce increased activation of visual pathways relative to emotionally neutral images. A predominant model for the preferential processing and attention to emotional stimuli posits that the amygdala modulates sensory pathways through its projections to visual cortices. However, recent behavioral studies have found intact perceptual facilitation of emotional stimuli...

The ‘identity’ of eighteenth century England has provoked much debate, with discussion often turning on the relative vibrancy of features displaying ‘modernity’ or the lingering aspects of an ‘ancien regime’.3 The polite vision of Langford and the Enlightened, liberatedworld seen by Porter share an emphasis on the eighteenth century looking forward. Yet these are contrasting pictures: on the on...

Although an attentional bias for threat has been implicated in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), evidence supporting such a bias has been inconsistent. Furthermore, few studies have made distinctions between attentional capture vs. attentional disengagement and the extent to which different emotional content modulates attention in OCD also remains unclear. To address these issues, we examine...

BACKGROUND Most neuroimaging studies investigating sexual arousal in paedophilia used erotic pictures together with a blocked fMRI design and long stimulus presentation time. While this approach allows the detection of sexual arousal, it does not enable the assessment of the immediate processing of erotically salient stimuli. Our study aimed to identify neuronal networks related to the immediat...

The induction of a severe fatty liver in rats by the addition of erotic acid to their purified diets was first reported by Standerfer and Handler (1). Creasey, Hankin, and Handschumacher (2) found that the liver fat was largely triglyceride and observed that its accumulation was both prevented and reversed by supplementing the erotic acid diets further with adenine (3). Marked alterations in th...

The induction of a severe fatty liver in rats by the addition of erotic acid to their purified diets was first reported by Standerfer and Handler (1). Creasey, Hankin, and Handschumacher (2) found that the liver fat was largely triglyceride and observed that its accumulation was both prevented and reversed by supplementing the erotic acid diets further with adenine (3). Marked alterations in th...

Other studies in this laboratory (1) drew our attention to the possibility that erotic acid might be concerned with the maintenance of adequate lactation in the rat and with the survival of the young. Since no data were available on the erotic acid content of milk, this study was undertaken. The occurrence of erotic acid as a component of milk has been indicated since 1904, when Biscaro and Bel...

Recent human functional imaging studies have linked the processing of pleasant visual stimuli to activity in mesolimbic reward structures. However, whether the activation is driven specifically by the pleasantness of the stimulus, or by its salience, is unresolved. Here we find in two studies that free viewing of pleasant images of erotic and romantic couples prompts clear, reliable increases i...