0

The scientific study of conciousness is difficult. Indeed, the enterprise seems to be almost a contradiction in terms. By most people's standards science cannot begin until the subject to be investigated has a definition, written down and generally agreed. "Consciousness" has no such definition. There have, in fact, been many serious attempts to remedy the situation. The most successful move co...

It has been shown that adding expressivity and emotional expressions to an agent’s communication systems would improve the interaction quality between this agent and a human user. In this paper we present a multimodal database of affect bursts, which are very short non-verbal expressions with facial, vocal, and gestural components that are highly synchronized and triggered by an identifiable ev...

Three decades of research demonstrate that individual differences in subjective response (SR) to acute alcohol effects predict heavy drinking and alcohol-related problems. However, the SR patterns conferring the greatest risk remain under debate. Morean and Corbin (2010) highlighted that extant SR measures commonly have limitations within the following areas: assessment of a comprehensive range...

Previous studies indicated that facilitating effects of implicit hints on insight problem solving are not universal. To clarify the mechanisms of this variability, the relationship between the use of hints and individual differences in personality traits were investigated. Participants engaged in a Remote Associates Test in which solution words were subliminally presented in one third of the tr...

The relationships between subjectively-reported emotional state and hemispheric laterality were investigated. Participants' emotional state was modified using emotional slides. Self-estimation of Energy Arousal and Hedonic Tone (positive valence) as well as Tense Arousal (negative valence) was derived from the Activation-Deactivation Adjective Checklist and the UWIST Mood Adjective Checklist. E...

A commentary on The role of the amygdala in the perception of positive emotions: an " intensity detector " It has long been known that the amygdala, a bilateral structure from the medial temporal lobe, is related to emotion, particularly in processing of aversive information (e.g., LeDoux, 1996). However, accumulating evidence suggests that amygdala activation is also involved in processing or ...