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Ergebnisse 2 Einträge

  • Phobic responses are strong emotional reactions towards phobic objects, which can be described as a deficit in the automatic regulation of emotions. Difficulties in the voluntary cognitive control of these emotions suggest a further phobia-specific deficit in effortful emotion regulation mechanisms. The actual study is based on this emotion regulation conceptualization of specific phobias. The aim is to investigate the neural correlates of these two emotion regulation deficits in spider phobics. Sixteen spider phobic females participated in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study in which they were asked to voluntarily up- and down-regulate their emotions elicited by spider and generally aversive pictures with a reappraisal strategy. In line with the hypothesis concerning an automatic emotion regulation deficit, increased activity in the insula and reduced activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex was observed. Furthermore, phobia-specific effortful regulation within phobics was associated with altered activity in medial prefrontal cortex areas. Altogether, these results suggest that spider phobic subjects are indeed characterized by a deficit in the automatic as well as the effortful regulation of emotions elicited by phobic compared with aversive stimuli. These two forms of phobic emotion regulation deficits are associated with altered activity in different medial prefrontal cortex subregions.

  • Sferics are weak, naturally occurring electromagnetic fields related to specific weather conditions. There are some hints that these signals might be responsible for certain complaints that are often described as "weather sensitivity syndrome." The study's purpose was to find out whether humans, when exposed to simulated sferics, can consciously perceive any kind of psychophysiological changes. 63 subjects were trained within a simple learning paradigm to discriminate between phases where simulated sferics were present or absent. They were reinforced for each correct decision out of 80 judgements by means of acoustic signals. A reward of 100 German marks was pledged to the participant who would achieve the best result of the total sample. The total number of correct judgements did not differ from a random run and no learning occurred. Subjects who reported fewer bodily complaints in their recent past had higher scores in the discrimination task.

Last update from database: 04.06.25, 15:35 (UTC)