Sexual activity involves excitement with high arousal and pleasure as typical features of emotions. Brain activations specifically related to erotic feelings and those related to general emotional processing are therefore hard to disentangle. Using fMRI in 21 healthy subjects (11 males and 10 females), we investigated regions that show activations specifically related to the viewing of sexually...

In this paper, we describe our investigation of traces of naturally occurring emotions in electrical brain signals, that can be used to build interfaces that respond to our emotional state. This study confirms a number of known affective correlates in a realistic, uncontrolled environment for the emotions of valence (or pleasure), arousal and dominance: (1) a significant decrease in frontal pow...

Music’s allure lies in its power to stir the emotions. But the relation between the physical properties of an acoustic signal and its emotional impact remains an open area of research. This paper reports the results and possible implications of a pilot study and survey used to construct an emotion index for subjective ratings of music. The dimensions of pleasure and arousal exhibit high reliabi...

Multisensory marketing has been seen as an approach improving advertising effect in the social science, neuroscience, and marketing literature. For examining visual/audio synesthesia, the effect of smelling and tasting an online product, this study first developed design elements of digital video advertising: rational/emotional appeals and fast/slow tempo. Moreover, it strives to investigate em...

Individuals differ in the extent to which they emphasize feelings of pleasure or displeasure in their verbal reports of emotional experience, termed valence focus (VF). Two event-contingent, experience-sampling studies examined the relationship between VF and sensitivity to pleasant and unpleasant social cues. It was predicted, and found, that individuals with greater VF (i.e., who emphasized f...

This study introduces a corpus of 260 naturalistic human nonlinguistic vocalizations representing nine emotions: amusement, anger, disgust, effort, fear, joy, pain, pleasure, and sadness. The recognition accuracy in a rating task varied greatly per emotion, from <40% for joy and pain, to >70% for amusement, pleasure, fear, and sadness. In contrast, the raters' linguistic-cultural group had no e...

Anhedonia is a personality trait associated with a decrease in the ability to feel pleasure. We investigated the experience of pleasure in individuals with physical and social anhedonia for positive pictures with varying levels of luminance contrast. Photographs with either a sensory or a social content were modified with a contrast-gradation procedure. Participants had to report the intensity ...

The paper argues that values are universals, either properties or relations. For the latter, instantiation is a matter of the content of the relation, the relata, and the context (the instantiation of further relations). This moderate realist conception helps us solve some notorious problems in axiology, i.e. malicious pleasure, compassion, envy, and perverted love. Another other important impl...

Cigarette smoking is an addictive behavior. There are two learned emotional responses to smoking that may be particularly important for promoting addiction to smoking: the pleasure obtained from the airway sensory effects of smoking (airway sensory pleasure) and the urge to smoke that is elicited by environmental smoking cues (cue-induced urge). The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) has be...

Hedonic response is abnormal in negative schizotypy. Using self-report methods, Applegate, El-Deredy, and Bentall (2009) reported that schizotypal anhedonia was associated with a poor capacity to savour, where savouring is the ability to mentally rehearse past, present and future pleasant experiences. A behavioural measure of savouring, the Verbal Fluency Test of Enjoyable Experiences (VFTEE), ...