BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Nowadays the mechanism of homosexuality is little known. Few studies have been carried out to explore the brain functional changes of homosexual men during sexual arousal. We used functional MR imaging (fMRI) to determine whether the patterns of brain activation in homosexual and heterosexual men differed during visually evoked sexual arousal. MATERIALS AND METHODS To a...

Evidence that structured physical activity can help to regulate affective state has spurred interest in identifying associations between unstructured physical activity and affective states during daily life. The present study examined whether stressful daily life situations that elicit affective arousal also elicit increased physical activity in the form of restless movement. The study compared...

The role of hypocretin (orexin) neurotransmission in waking and arousal, though of intense interest, is poorly understood. In this issue of Neuron, demonstrate that, in general, hypocretin neurons are minimally active during both sleep and quiet waking. In contrast, these neurons display robust activity during periods of alert and/or active waking.

Immersive virtual environments (IVEs) represent settings that simulate the physical world. Users interacting in such venues commonly display behaviours like ones would occur However, little is known about how affective states experienced while browsing IVEs may turn, influence user’s interactive behaviour. The present research investigates affect terms of arousal and valence generated by influe...

The question of how autonomous robots could be part of our everyday life is gaining increasing interest. We present here an experiment in which an autonomous robot explores its environment and tries to familiarize itself with its novel elements using a neural-network-based architecture. When confronted with novelty, the lack of stability of its learning structures increases the arousal level of...

The work presented in this paper aims at assessing human emotions using peripheral as well as electroencephalographic (EEG) physiological signals. Three specific areas of the valence-arousal emotional space are defined, corresponding to negatively excited, positively excited, and calm-neutral states. An acquisition protocol based on the recall of past emotional events has been designed to acqui...