1,720,982 research outputs found
Influence of body position, emotions, placebo and cognitive modulation on pain experience and pain-related somatosensory ERPs
Get PDFThe present work contributed to our understanding of the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying pain modulation through sensory, attentional, emotional and cognitive processes. We used subjective, behavioral, and electrophysiological indexes to reveal the effects of body position, emotions, placebo expectations and cognitive reappraisal on subjective pain experience and pain-related somatosensory potentials. Four studies were conducted to investigate different forms of pain modulation. Study 1 tested the hypothesis that the horizontal body position reduces pain perception and cortical pain processing. We demonstrated that the supine vs. sitting body position was associated with dampened perception of non-painful stimuli and inhibited cortical late processing (300-600 ms) of non-painful and painful stimuli, related to neural activity within frontal right regions (anterior cingulate cortex and superior frontal gyrus). Study 2 investigated gender differences in the emotional modulation of pain. Although males and females did not differ at the behavioral level and reported reduced pain ratings only during the visual perception of erotic pictures, striking gender differences emerged in the N2 and P2 potentials, elicited by painful stimuli. Males showed inhibited cortical processing of pain stimuli when viewing erotic pictures only, whereas females showed a differentiated cortical pain modulation for each emotional content took into consideration (erotic vs. sport/adventure vs. neutral vs. fear/threat vs. mutilation pictures), in particular for N2 potentials. In Study 3, we examine the role of individual beliefs on the effectiveness of a traditional and a homeopathic analgesic treatment. We utilized a deceptive paradigm, i.e., neither the participants nor the experimenters were aware that the administered treatment was an inert substance. We found that only the participants who took a treatment that was coherent with their beliefs showed a reduced cortical pain processing, indicated by dampened P2 amplitudes. Finally, Study 4 demonstrated that healthy participants are able to modify their pain experience using an imaginary-based reappraisal strategy. Perceived pain intensity and unpleasantness were either reduced or enhanced with respect to a neutral condition, and an effective pain inhibition was associated with increased N2 and decreased P2 amplitude
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Retrieval-Induced Forgetting: Gli effetti negativi della pratica sulla memoria episodica
No full textRetrieving information from episodic memory may result in the paradoxical impairment of subsequent recall of related information. This phenomenon has been called Retrieval-Induced Forgetting, and has typically been investigated by means of the retrieval practice paradigm. This paper aims to review twenty years of research which employed this paradigm to understand the properties of this phenomenon, with a special focus on studies addressing the theoretical debate between inhibitory and interference accounts. Recent works concerning the neural underpinnings of Retrieval-Induced Forgetting and its hypothetical applications in several psychological domains are also discussed
Neurophysiological markers of Retrieval-Induced Forgetting in multiplication fact retrieval.
No full textEvent-related potential (ERP) counterparts of practice effects in multiplication fact retrieval were examined. Participants performed a multiplication verification task after having practiced a specific problem set. Practice was either active (retrieval of solutions to multiplication problems) or passive (reexposure to the same operands plus the correct result). Behavioral data showed retrieval-induced facilitation for practiced items and retrieval-induced forgetting for related, unpracticed items, irrespective of practice type. ERPs revealed that, for the active practice group, forgetting was reflected in a reduced N100 component time-locked to result onset. Irrespective of practice type, forgetting was also reflected in a reduced result-locked P350 component, whereas facilitation was associated with an increased amplitude of the same component. These results suggest that beneficial and detrimental effects of practice may be mediated by partially distinct processes
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Neurocognitive evidence for mental imagery-driven hypoalgesic and hyperalgesic pain regulation
Get PDFMental imagery has the potential to influence perception by directly altering sensory, cognitive, and affective
brain activity associated with imagined content. While it is well established that mental imagery can both
exacerbate and alleviate acute and chronic pain, it is currently unknown how imagery mechanisms regulate
pain perception. For example, studies to date have been unable to determine whether imagery effects depend
upon a general redirection of attention away from pain or focused attentional mechanisms. To address these issues,
we recorded subjective, behavioral and ERP responses using 64-channel EEG while healthy human participants
applied a mental imagery strategy to decrease or increase pain sensations. When imagining a glove
covering the forearm, participants reported decreased perceived intensity and unpleasantness, classified fewer
high-intensity stimuli as painful, and showed a more conservative response bias. In contrast, when imagining a
lesion on the forearm, participants reported increased pain intensity and unpleasantness, classified more lowintensity
stimuli as painful, and displayed a more liberal response bias. Using a mass-univariate approach,we further
showed differential modulation of the N2 potentials across conditions, with inhibition and facilitation respectively
increasing and decreasing N2 amplitudes between 122 and 180 ms. Within this time window,
source localization associated inhibiting vs. facilitating pain with neural activity in cortical regions involved in
cognitive inhibitory control and in the retrieval of semantic information (i.e., right inferior frontal and temporal
regions). In contrast, the main sources of neural activity associatedwith facilitating vs. inhibiting pain were identified
in cortical regions typically implicated in salience processing and emotion regulation (i.e., left insular,
inferior-middle frontal, supplementary motor and precentral regions). Overall, these findings suggest that the
content of a mental image directly alters pain-related decision and evaluative processing to flexibly produce
hypoalgesic and hyperalgesic outcomes
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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