Search results for "behavioral"
showing 10 items of 3011 documents
Variability in energy expenditure is much greater in males than females
2022
In mammals, trait variation is often reported to be greater among males than females. However, to date, mainly only morphological traits have been studied. Energy expenditure represents the metabolic costs of multiple physical, physiological, and behavioral traits. Energy expenditure could exhibit particularly high greater male variation through a cumulative effect if those traits mostly exhibit greater male variation, or a lack of greater male variation if many of them do not. Sex differences in energy expenditure variation have been little explored. We analyzed a large database on energy expenditure in adult humans (1494 males and 3108 females) to investigate whether humans have evolved s…
Distinct effects of positive and negative music on older adults' auditory target identification performances.
2014
Older adults, compared to younger adults, are more likely to attend to pleasant situations and avoid unpleasant ones. Yet, it is unclear whether such a phenomenon may be generalized to musical emotions. In this study, we investigated whether there is an age-related difference in how musical emotions are experienced and how positive and negative music influences attention performances in a target identification task. Thirty-one young and twenty-eight older adults were presented with 40 musical excerpts conveying happiness, peacefulness, sadness, and threat. While listening to music, participants were asked to rate their feelings and monitor each excerpt for the occurrence of an auditory tar…
The effect of age on cognitive performance of frontal patients
2015
Age is known to affect prefrontal brain structure and executive functioning in healthy older adults, patients with neurodegenerative conditions and TBI. Yet, no studies appear to have systematically investigated the effect of age on cognitive performance in patients with focal lesions. We investigated the effect of age on the cognitive performance of a large sample of tumour and stroke patients with focal unilateral, frontal (n=68), or non-frontal lesions (n=45) and healthy controls (n=52). We retrospectively reviewed their cross sectional cognitive and imaging data. In our frontal patients, age significantly predicted the magnitude of their impairment on two executive tests (Raven's Advanc…
Mentally represented motor actions in normal agingII. The influence of the gravito-inertial context on the duration of overt and covert arm movements
2007
Here, we address the question of whether normal aging influences action representation by comparing the ability of 14 young (age: 23.6 +/- 2.1 years) and 14 older (age: 70.1 +/- 4.5 years) adults to mentally simulate arm movements under a varying dynamic context. We conducted two experiments in which we experimentally manipulated the gravity and inertial components of arm dynamics: (i) unloaded and loaded vertical arm movements, rotation around the shoulder joint, (ii) unloaded and loaded horizontal arm movements, rotations around the shoulder and elbow joints, in two directions (inertial anisotropy phenomenon). The main findings indicated that imagery ability was equivalent between the two…
The development of involuntary and voluntary attention from childhood to adulthood: A combined behavioral and event-related potential study
2006
Abstract Objective This study investigated auditory involuntary and voluntary attention in children aged 6–8, 10–12 and young adults. The strength of distracting stimuli (20% and 5% pitch changes) and the amount of allocation of attention were varied. Methods In an auditory distraction paradigm event-related potentials (ERPs) and behavioral data were measured from subjects either performing a sound duration discrimination task or watching a silent video. Results Pitch changed sounds caused prolonged reaction times and decreased hit rates in all age groups. Larger distractors (20%) caused stronger distraction in children, but not in adults. The amplitudes of mismatch negativity (MMN), P3a, a…
Virtual reality treatment of flying phobia.
2002
Flying phobia (FP) might become a very incapacitating and disturbing problem in a person's social, working, and private areas. Psychological interventions based on exposure therapy have proved to be effective, but given the particular nature of this disorder they bear important limitations. Exposure therapy for FP might be excessively costly in terms of time, money, and efforts. Virtual reality (VR) overcomes these difficulties as different significant environments might be created, where the patient can interact with what he or she fears while in a totally safe and protected environment, the therapist's consulting room. This paper intends, on one hand, to show the different scenarios desig…
Improvements in Empathy and Cognitive Flexibility after Court-Mandated Intervention Program in Intimate Partner Violence Perpetrators: The Role of Al…
2016
Research assessing the effectiveness of intervention programs for intimate partner violence (IPV) perpetrators has increased considerably in recent years. However, most of it has been focused on the analysis of psychological domains, neglecting neuropsychological variables and the effects of alcohol consumption on these variables. This study evaluated potential neuropsychological changes (emotional decoding, perspective taking, emotional empathy and cognitive flexibility) and their relationship with alcohol consumption in a mandatory intervention program for IPV perpetrators, as well as how these variables affect the risk of IPV recidivism. The sample was composed of 116 individuals with hi…
Longitudinal study of alexithymia and multiple sclerosis
2013
Objective The aim of this study was to investigate the course of alexithymia and its relation with anxiety and depression in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS), over a period of 5 years. Methods Sixty-two MS patients were examined at two timepoints, 5 years apart, and they answered questionnaires collecting socio-demographic, medical, and psychological data (depression, anxiety, alexithymia). Results Our data show that emotional disorders remain stable over time in patients with MS, particularly as regards alexithymia and anxiety. Conversely, the rate of depression decreased between the two evaluations, falling from 40% to 26%. The two dimensions of alexithymia (i.e., difficulty describi…
The role of verbal ability in the processing of complex verbal information.
1994
This study investigated the relation between psychometric mental-ability test scores and several reaction-time measures; a simple-reaction task, a choice-reaction task, the Posner and Mitchell (1967) letter-identification task, and a variation of the sentence-verification task. Scores on the Raven Advanced Progressive Matrices and the Verbal Subtest of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SATV) were obtained. The less complex information-processing tasks replicate earlier studies in which general intelligence was only marginally related to reaction-time measures. The sentence-verification task systematically varied task complexity. Several direct and derived measures from the task were significant…
Effect of transcranial direct current stimulation on semantic discrimination eyeblink conditioning
2015
Abstract Background Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a neuromodulation method that has been used to modulate learning. We tested whether anodal tDCS targeted at the left DLPFC could enhance learning in a semantic variant of discrimination eyeblink conditioning, i.e., whether the stimulation would have a specific effect on the discrimination ability, rate of acquisition, amplitude of the conditioned response (CR), or all of these. Methods Immediately prior to the eyeblink conditioning, the participants received either active stimulation of 1 mA for 10 min or sham stimulation. The anode was placed over F3 and the cathode over the right supraorbital area. The conditioned stimu…