Search results for " Experimental"

Explaining the enjoyment of negative emotions evoked by the arts : the need to consider empathy and other underlying mechanisms of emotion induction.

2017

AbstractAny model aiming to explain the enjoyment of negative emotions in the context of the arts should consider how works of art are able to induce emotional responses in the first place. For instance, research on empathy and the arts suggests that the psychological processes that mediate the enjoyment of sadness and horror may be fundamentally different.

A new angle on contour integration: The role of corners

2017

Contribution of sinusoidal endothelial liver cells to liver fibrosis: expression of transforming growth factor-beta 1 receptors and modulation of pla…

1993

Transforming growth factor-beta 1 is an important cytokine in the pathophysiology of liver fibrosis, stimulating the production of extracellular matrix. Whether this cytokine can also control the degradation of matrix proteins in liver cells has not been investigated. Because plasmin is an important protease for the degradation of matrix glycoproteins, we investigated whether sinusoidal endothelial liver cells could contribute to fibrosing liver disease through the modulation of plasmin-generating enzymes in response to transforming growth factor-beta 1. Sinusoidal endothelial cells from guinea pig liver were investigated in pure monolayer culture. Using 125I-labelled transforming growth fa…

The role of hedonics in the Human Affectome.

2019

International audience; Experiencing pleasure and displeasure is a fundamental part of life. Hedonics guide behavior, affect decision-making, induce learning, and much more. As the positive and negative valence of feelings, hedonics are core processes that accompany emotion, motivation, and bodily states. Here, the affective neuroscience of pleasure and displeasure that has largely focused on the investigation of reward and pain processing, is reviewed. We describe the neurobiological systems of hedonics and factors that modulate hedonic experiences (e.g., cognition, learning, sensory input). Further, we review maladaptive and adaptive pleasure and displeasure functions in mental disorders …

Pleasurable music affects reinforcement learning according to the listener.

2013

Mounting evidence links the enjoyment of music to brain areas implicated in emotion and the dopaminergic reward system. In particular, dopamine release in the ventral striatum seems to play a major role in the rewarding aspect of music listening. Striatal dopamine also influences reinforcement learning, such that subjects with greater dopamine efficacy learn better to approach rewards while those with lesser dopamine efficacy learn better to avoid punishments. In this study, we explored the practical implications of musical pleasure through its ability to facilitate reinforcement learning via non-pharmacological dopamine elicitation. Subjects from a wide variety of musical backgrounds chose…

An integrative review of the enjoyment of sadness associated with music

2018

The recent surge of interest towards the paradoxical pleasure produced by sad music has generated a handful of theories and an array of empirical explorations on the topic. However, none of these have attempted to weigh the existing evidence in a systematic fashion. The present work puts forward an integrative framework laid out over three levels of explanation – biological, psycho-social, and cultural – to compare and integrate the existing findings in a meaningful way. First, we review the evidence pertinent to experiences of pleasure associated with sad music from the fields of neuroscience, psychophysiology, and endocrinology. Then, the psychological and interpersonal mechanisms underly…

Constituents of Music and Visual-Art Related Pleasure - A Critical Integrative Literature Review.

2017

The present literature review investigated how pleasure induced by music and visualart has been conceptually understood in empirical research over the past 20 years. After an initial selection of abstracts from seven databases (keywords: pleasure, reward, enjoyment, and hedonic), twenty music and eleven visual-art papers were systematically compared. The following questions were addressed: (1) What is the role of the keyword in the research question? (2) Is pleasure considered a result of variation in the perceiver’s internal or external attributes? (3) What are the most commonly employed methods and main variables in empirical settings? Based on these questions, our critical integrative an…

Interactivity, Values and the Microgenesis of Learning in a Tertiary Setting

2016

Student learning is a hot topic in tertiary education circles these days. However, it is not always clear what words like ‘learning’ and ‘learner’ mean. It is important for educationalists to understand learning as it actually occurs in real-time learning situations. We build on Hutchins’ theory of distributed cognition and Gibson’s ecological psychology to show how human learning is an interactive process. We propose Multimodal Event Analysis as a tool for analyzing a University tutorial in which students attempt to solve a problem of regression analysis. We investigate how participants’ multimodal interactivity with the changing affordance arrays of the learning situation is the driver an…

The Norm of Neutrality in Collaborative Knowledge Construction

2017

Social media enabled collaboration at unprecedented levels. And while research points to the benefits of mass collaboration, it has also revealed challenges and problems. Here we explore biases in collaboratively constructed knowledge. To this end, we compared two online encyclopedias: Wikipedia and the extreme right-wing Metapedia. Both urge users to present topics from a neutral point of view. Using different measures we found that Metapedia articles (vs. Wikipedia articles) are significantly shorter, contain fewer references, contain relatively more anger- and anxiety-related words, rarely present more than one point of view in controversies, and often convey opinions – for inctance, by …

Opening the can of worms: A comprehensive examination of authoritarianism

2020

Abstract We carry out an exhaustive analysis of both right-wing and left-wing forms of authoritarianism in order to assess the specific predictors of these illiberal agendas. Firstly, we conduct a literature review on authoritarianism as a multidimensional psychological construct, with emphasis on its controversial links to the political spectrum, religion, and economic conservatism. Moreover, we review its potential associations with social axioms, as an interesting psychological framework to aid understanding of authoritarian attitudes. We extract three working hypotheses from this literature review, all successfully tested in two empirical studies (n = 1097 and n = 1102). Our results sug…