Our preferences are shaped by past experience in many ways, but a systematic understanding of the factors is yet to be achieved. For example, studies of the mere exposure effect show that experience with an item leads to increased liking (familiarity preference), but the exact opposite tendency is found in other studies utilizing dishabituation (novelty preference). Recently, it has been found ...

The amygdalae play an important role in the evaluation and processing of emotionally salient visual stimuli. However, individual differences in personality traits, such as Harm Avoidance (HA), have been reported to influence emotional amygdalae responses. To trigger strong approach and withdrawal-related emotions in 'never depressed' young female subjects under fMRI, we presented them with bloc...

The Expert program is a part of larger project (Intelligent Tutoring System) and plays a role of an assistant and disputant with the system user. The authors of the article analyse algorithm of this module and discuss various Java technologies for preparation of application.

This study assessed embodied simulation via electromyography (EMG) as participants first encoded emotionally ambiguous faces with emotion concepts (i.e., "angry,""happy") and later passively viewed the faces without the concepts. Memory for the faces was also measured. At initial encoding, participants displayed more smiling-related EMG activity in response to faces paired with "happy" than in ...

The supervision of people in special circumstances, having as their purpose detecting risk situations, is an area which has many applications. In this context we are interested, in this paper, the problems of driver drowsiness detection based on video analysis. We describe a new approach to detect reduced alertness automatically, to prevent the driver. Unlike many other works, our noninvasively...

Testosterone moderates behavioral and physiological responses to the emotion anger. However, little is known about the effects of testosterone in the human brain in the context of the perception of anger. We used fMRI to measure BOLD responses to anger faces in the amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) as a function of endogenous testosterone levels in 24 participants (10 men). In...

It has been proposed that two major axes, dominance and trustworthiness, characterize the social dimensions of face evaluation. Whether evaluation of faces on these social dimensions is restricted to conscious appraisal or happens at a preconscious level is unknown. Here we provide behavioral evidence that such preconscious evaluations exist and that they are likely to be interpretations arisin...

Behavioral inhibition (BI) is a risk factor for anxiety disorders. While the two constructs bear behavioral similarities, previous work has not extended these parallels to the neural level. This study examined amygdala reactivity during a task previously used with clinically anxious adolescents. Adolescents were selected for enduring patterns of BI or non-inhibition (BN). We examined amygdala r...

We present a platform for parallelized manipulations of individual polarizable micron-scale particles (i.e., microparticles) that combines negative dielectrophoretic forcing with the passive capture of hydrodynamic weir-based trapping. Our work enables manipulations using ejection- andor exclusion-based methods. In ejection operations, we unload targeted weirs by displacing microparticles from ...

Radial, space-filling (RSF) techniques for hierarchy visualization have several advantages over traditional node-link diagrams, including the ability to efficiently use the display space while effectively conveying the hierarchy structure. Several RSF systems and tools have been developed to date, each with varying degrees of support for interactive operations such as selection and navigation. ...