Olfaction modulates cortical arousal independent of perceived odor intensity and pleasantness.

Throughout history, various odors have been harnessed to invigorate or relax the mind. The mechanisms underlying odors' diverse arousal effects remain poorly understood. We conducted five experiments (184 participants) to investigate this issue, using pupillometry, electroencephalography, and the attentional blink paradigm, which exemplifies the limit in attentional capacity.

Effect of virtual reality-based exercise and physical exercise on adolescents with overweight and obesity: study protocol for a randomised controlled trial.

Introduction: Obesity is a complex and multifactorial disease that has affected many adolescents in recent decades. Clinical practice guidelines recommend exercise as the key treatment option for adolescents with overweight and obesity. However, the effects of virtual reality (VR) exercise on the physical and brain health of adolescents with overweight and obese remain unclear.

It's time for attentional control: Temporal expectation in the attentional blink.

The attentional blink (AB) reveals a limitation in conscious processing of sequential targets. Although it is widely held that the AB derives from a structural bottleneck of central capacity, how the central processing is constrained is still unclear. As the AB reflects the dilemma of deploying attentional resources in the time dimension, research on temporal allocation provides an important avenue for understanding the mechanism.

Attentional bias towards appealing and disgusting food cues varies with the menstrual cycle.

Ovarian hormonal changes along the female menstrual cycle are believed to adapt women to the external environment through various adaptive strategies, including modulating appetite and eating behavior. We aimed to compare food-associated behavioral responses between two distinct menstrual phases (late follicular vs. mid-luteal) and investigate the underlying neural mechanism.

Immediate Temporal Information Modulates the Target Identification in the Attentional Blink.

It has been shown that learned temporal information can be exploited to help facilitate the target identification in the attentional blink task. Here, we tested whether similar exploitation also worked on short-term temporal information, even when it did not reliably predict the target onset. In two experiments, we randomly manipulated either the interval between targets (T1 and T2; Experiment 1) or the temporal regularity of stimulus presentation (Experiment 2) in each trial.

Mid-Luteal Olfactory Abilities Reveal Healthy Women's Emotional and Cognitive Functions.

Ovarian hormones modulate women's physical and psychological states periodically. Although the olfactory function is increasingly recognized as a reflection of physical and mental health conditions in the clinic, the role of olfaction in emotional and cognitive functions for healthy individuals has yet to be elucidated, especially when taking the menstrual cycle into account. We carried out a comprehensive investigation to explore whether the menstrual cycle could modulate women's olfactory function and whether healthy women's emotional symptoms and behavioral impulsivity could be characterized by their olfactory abilities at a specific menstrual cycle stage.

Nasal airflow engages central olfactory processing and shapes olfactory percepts.

Binding of airborne odour molecules to olfactory receptors at the top of the nasal cavity gives rise to our rich olfactory experience. Whether airflow plays a role in human olfactory perception beyond the transportation of odorants is scantly known. Combining psychophysical measures with strict controls of nasal flow parameters, we demonstrate in four experiments that the perceived intensity of a unilaterally presented odour decreases systematically with the amount of contralateral nasal airflow, in manners that are independent of odour flow rate, nasal pressure, perceived sniff vigour or attentional allocation.

Development of the Chinese Smell Identification Test.

Smell identification ability reflects the functional integrity of the human olfactory system. Its deficit is a prodromal marker for Parkinson's disease and is also implicated in Alzheimer's disease and other neurological and psychiatric disorders. Considering the impact of cultural factors on odor identifiability, we have developed a smell identification test specifically for the Chinese population (CSIT), which includes 40 odor items that are familiar to this population, presented in a multiple-choice format.

How Does Adult Attachment Affect Human Recognition of Love-related and Sex-related Stimuli: An ERP Study.

In the present study, we investigated the relationship among three emotion-motivation systems (adult attachment, romantic love, and sex). We recorded event-related potentials in 37 healthy volunteers who had experienced romantic love while they viewed SEX, LOVE, FRIEND, SPORT, and NEUTRAL images. We also measured adult attachment styles, level of passionate love and sexual attitudes.