For human interaction, it is important to understand what emotional state others are in. Especially the observation of faces aids us in putting behaviours into context and gives insight into emotions and mental states of others. Detecting whether someone is nervous, a form of state anxiety, is such an example as it reveals a person's familiarity and contentment with the circumstances.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe ability to adjust attentional focus to varying levels of task demands depends on the adaptive recruitment of cognitive control processes. The present study investigated for the first time whether the mobilization of cognitive control during response-conflict trials in a flanker task is associated with effort-related sympathetic activity as measured by changes in the RZ-interval at a single-trial level, thus providing an alternative to the pre-ejection period (PEP) which can only be reliably measured in ensemble-averaged data. We predicted that response conflict leads to a physiological orienting response (i.
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