Cognitive exertion affects the appraisal of one's own and other people's pain.

Correctly evaluating others' pain is a crucial prosocial ability. In both clinical and private settings, caregivers assess their other people's pain, sometimes under the effect of poor sleep and high workload and fatigue. However, the effect played by such cognitive strain in the appraisal of others' pain remains unclear.

The eRDS v6 Stereotest and the Vivid Vision Stereo Test: Two New Tests of Stereoscopic Vision.

Purpose: To describe two new stereoacuity tests: the eRDS v6 stereotest, a global dynamic random dot stereogram (dRDS) test, and the Vivid Vision Stereo Test version 2 (VV), a local or "contour" stereotest for virtual reality (VR) headsets; and to evaluate the tests' reliability, validity compared to a dRDS standard, and learning effects.

Methods: Sixty-four subjects passed a battery of stereotests, including perceiving depth from RDS. Validity was evaluated relative to a tablet-based dRDS reference test, ASTEROID.

Frequency-specific gaze modulation of emotional face processing in the human amygdala.

Determining the social significance of emotional face expression is of major importance for adaptive behavior, and gaze direction provides critical information in this process. The amygdala is implicated in both emotion and gaze processing, but how and when it integrates expression and gaze cues remains unresolved. We tackled this question using intracranial electroencephalography in epileptic patients to assess both amygdala (n = 12) and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC; n = 11) time-frequency evoked responses to faces with different emotional expressions and different gaze directions.

Prestimulus amygdala spectral activity is associated with visual face awareness.

Alpha cortical oscillations have been proposed to suppress sensory processing in the visual, auditory, and tactile domains, influencing conscious stimulus perception. However, it is unknown whether oscillatory neural activity in the amygdala, a subcortical structure involved in salience detection, has a similar impact on stimulus awareness. Recording intracranial electroencephalography (EEG) from 9 human amygdalae during face detection in a continuous flash suppression task, we found increased spectral prestimulus power and phase coherence, with most consistent effects in the alpha band, when faces were undetected relative to detected, similarly as previously observed in cortex with this task using scalp-EEG.

Emotional brain states carry over and enhance future memory formation.

Emotional arousal can produce lasting, vivid memories for emotional experiences, but little is known about whether emotion can prospectively enhance memory formation for temporally distant information. One mechanism that may support prospective memory enhancements is the carry-over of emotional brain states that influence subsequent neutral experiences. Here we found that neutral stimuli encountered by human subjects 9-33 min after exposure to emotionally arousing stimuli had greater levels of recollection during delayed memory testing compared to those studied before emotional and after neutral stimulus exposure.

Imaging studies of functional neurologic disorders.

Brain imaging techniques provide unprecedented opportunities to study the neural mechanisms underlying functional neurologic disorder (FND, or conversion disorder), which have long remained a mystery and clinical challenge for physicians, as they arise with no apparent underlying organic disease. One of the first questions addressed by imaging studies concerned whether motor conversion deficits (e.g.

Functional limb weakness and paralysis.

Functional (psychogenic) limb weakness describes genuinely experienced limb power or paralysis in the absence of neurologic disease. The hallmark of functional limb weakness is the presence of internal inconsistency revealing a pattern of symptoms governed by abnormally focused attention. In this chapter we review the history and epidemiology of this clinical presentation as well as its subjective experience highlighting the detailed descriptions of authors at the end of the 19th and early 20th century.