Thirst for Intention? Grasping a Glass Is a Thirst-Controlled Action.

Every day and every hour, we feel we perform numerous voluntary actions, i.e., actions under the control of our will.

Music and academic performance.

In a previous study we demonstrated that listening to a pleasant music while performing an academic test helped students to overcome stress, to devote more time to more stressful and more complicated task and the grades were higher. Yet, there remained ambiguities as for the causes of the higher test performance of these students: do they perform better because they hear music during their examinations, or would they perform better anyway because they are more gifted/motivated? This motivated the current study as a preliminary step toward that general question: Do students who like/perform music have better grades than the others? Our results confirmed this hypothesis: students studying music have better grades in all subjects.

Mozart effect, cognitive dissonance, and the pleasure of music.

We explore a possibility that the 'Mozart effect' points to a fundamental cognitive function of music. Would such an effect of music be due to the hedonicity, a fundamental dimension of mental experience? The present paper explores a recent hypothesis that music helps to tolerate cognitive dissonances and thus enabled accumulation of knowledge and human cultural evolution. We studied whether the influence of music is related to its hedonicity and whether pleasant or unpleasant music would influence scholarly test performance and cognitive dissonance.

A structural model of emotions of cognitive dissonances.

Cognitive dissonance is the stress that comes from holding two conflicting thoughts simultaneously in the mind, usually arising when people are asked to choose between two detrimental or two beneficial options. In view of the well-established role of emotions in decision making, here we investigate whether the conventional structural models used to represent the relationships among basic emotions, such as the Circumplex model of affect, can describe the emotions of cognitive dissonance as well. We presented a questionnaire to 34 anonymous participants, where each question described a decision to be made among two conflicting motivations and asked the participants to rate analogically the pleasantness and the intensity of the experienced emotion.

The emergence of consciousness in phylogeny.

The brains of animals show chemical, anatomical, and functional differences, such as dopamine production and structure of sleep, between Amniota and older groups. In addition, play behavior, capacity to acquire taste aversion, sensory pleasure in decision making, and expression of emotional tachycardia and fever started also to be displayed by Amniota, suggesting that the brain may have began to work differently in early Amniota than in Lissamphibia and earlier vertebrates. Thus we propose that emotion, and more broadly speaking consciousness, emerged in the evolutionary line among the early Amniota.

Antipsychotic drug and body weight set-point.

Objective: Antipsychotic (AP) drugs frequently induce weight gain. The present study aimed at exploring a potential association between antipsychotic-induced weight gain and delayed negative alliesthesia for sweet stimuli.

Research Methods And Procedures: The study aimed at recruiting patients undergoing AP treatment, half of them with stable weight and the other half with documented weight gain.

Dieting and food choice in grocery shopping.

As obesity becomes increasingly prevalent, many people are trying to control their body weight through dieting, with mitigated results. We analyzed the impact of weight loss on food choice by recording the grocery basket composition of 100 participants, using their grocery receipts. Participants also anonymously completed a questionnaire about age, sex, diet, recent body weight change, reasons for recent body weight changes, and perceived difficulties in losing weight.

Dionysians and Apollonians.

There are two sorts of scientists: Dionysians, who rely on intuition, and Apollonians, who are more systematic. Self-experimentation is a Dionysian approach that is likely to open new lines of research. Unfortunately, the Dionysian approach does not allow one to predict the results of experiments.

Decision making: rational or hedonic?

Three experiments studied the hedonicity of decision making. Participants rated their pleasure/displeasure while reading item-sentences describing political and social problems followed by different decisions (Questionnaire 1). Questionnaire 2 was multiple-choice, grouping the items from Questionnaire 1.

Body weight and satiation after duodenal switch: 2 years later.

Background: The authors investigated body weight, satiation, and gustative pleasure of obese patients 2 years after a bariatric operation: the biliopancreatic diversion with duodenal switch (DS).

Methods: 9 operated patients, 10 unoperated non-obese and 10 unoperated obese persons participated in the "alliesthesia (food distaste) test". This test is a psychometric assessment of satiation resulting from the pleasure or displeasure following the repeated ingestion of a sweet stimulus.

Does intestinal absorption participate in the ponderostat?

Body weight regulation is known to achieve energy balance through several responses: appetite, satiety, thermogenesis, feeding behavior. Absorption efficiency might be, also, another response. In this paper, we hypothesized that the intestinal absorption efficiency of the rat might be lowered in response to a high energy content of the diet.

Accelerated satiation after duodenal switch.

Background: This is to introduce a new test "negative alliesthesia" for measuring satiation after bariatric surgery. It is a test that is well known by physiologists but has never been used clinically. It is based on the observation that repeated pleasant gustatory stimuli turn into unpleasantness in the process of satiation.

Sensory pleasure optimizes muscular work.

Purpose: To determine how an individual optimizes muscular work.

Source: Several previous investigations by the author that explored the hedonicity of various sensations aroused during work and compared the results with the subjects' performances.

Principal Findings: When a subject is given the task to climb 300 m elevation on a treadmill, at various combinations of speed and slope, if slope is imposed and speed self adjusted, or speed imposed and slope self adjusted, the subject spontaneously climbs the 300 m in a constant time.

Adjustable set point: to honor Harold T. Hammel.

The value of a regulated variable in the absence of external perturbation stabilizes at the set point of the system. This set point is an information input that may be determined by an external signal to which the regulated variable is compared or may be determined by the structural characteristics of the system itself. In the case of temperature regulation the actual internal temperature is compared with the set point "wanted" by the organism.

Diet induced weight loss accelerates onset of negative alliesthesia in obese women.

Background: The physiological and behavioral responses to hypocaloric diet are to increase energy intake to defend a steady body weight. We utilized the method of "negative alliesthesia" for measuring the hedonic reponse to sweet stimulus before (Initial session) and 3 months after entering a weight loss program. The negative alliesthesia test is known by physiologists but few clinical data exist.

Flavor aversion learning induced by lithium chloride in reptiles but not in amphibians.

Flavor aversion learning occurs when digestive illness follows ingestion of a novel food. Such learning has been shown to exist in mammals and birds. In this experiment, we looked for flavor aversion learning in amphibians (Bufo paracnemis, Pachytriton breviceps) and reptiles (Basiliscus vitattus, B.

Nicotine lowers the body-weight set-point in male rats.

Set-point of body weight was assessed by the behavioral method of the weight threshold to hoard food. Intra-peritoneal injection of nicotine (0.02-0.

What is emotion?

There is no consensus in the literature on a definition of emotion. The term is taken for granted in itself and, most often, emotion is defined with reference to a list: anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise. This article expands on a thesis that motivational states can be compared to each other by means of a common currency (Philos.

Evidence that transient nicotine lowers the body weight set point.

Objective: Smokers usually gain weight when they quit smoking. The present work explores the hypothesis according to which such a rise is a behavioral response to a raised body weight set point taking place when nicotine is eliminated from the body.

Research Methods And Procedures: The human body weight set point was assessed with classical behavioral and psychophysical methods, from the delay to experience negative alliesthesia when repeatedly ingesting sweet stimuli.

Pleasure in decision-making situations.

Background: This study explores the role of pleasure in decision making.

Results: In Experiment 1, 12 subjects were presented with a questionnaire containing 46 items taken from the literature. Twenty-three items described a situation where a decision should be made and ended with a suggested solution.

Beard vs. forehead, ten years later.

Ten years ago (1988), we observed in a sample of 100 men that the area of the glabrous skin above the eyebrows was proportional to the area of the hairy skin on the cheeks, lips, and chin. Ten to 11 years later, we measured again 39 of the former subjects to check longitudinally whether the relationship would still be valid. In the group of 39 subjects, the correlation was again significant and the regression was practically the same as that obtained in the same sample 10 years earlier.