The goal of the present study was to examine if and how arousal can modulate response inhibition. Two competing hypotheses can be drawn from previous literature. One holds that alerting cues that elevate arousal should result in an impulsive response and therefore impair response inhibition. The other suggests that alerting enhances processing of…

Noise is a pervasive and influential source of stress. Whether through the acute effects of impulse noise or the chronic influence of prolonged exposure, the challenge of noise confronts many who must accomplish vital performance duties in its presence. Although noise has diffuse effects, which are shared in common with many other chronic forms of…

Background: Previous studies have found simultaneous increases in skin conductance response and decreases in heart rate when normally fluent speakers watched and listened to stuttered speech compared with fluent speech, suggesting that stuttering induces arousal and emotional unpleasantness in listeners. However, physiological responses of persons…

A total of 14 infants participated in this study of the recovery of visual orienting by crossmodal stimulation when no new visual information was present. The locus of the crossmodal stimulation (auditory stimulation) was discriminable to the subject. Infants in three age groups were tested on three occasions each separated by 30 days. No…

Indicates that a feeling of control over the environment affects the subject's response to aversive stimuli. This finding helps to reconcile those of other experimenters in the area. (RW)

Investigates intersensory interaction between auditory and visual stimulation in newborn infants. Following auditory stimulation, newborns' visual preferences for light patches of different intensity were examined. Results indicate that newborns attend to quantitative variations in stimulation and that these variations reflect both the objective…

Deals with the interaction of general arousal and aggressive stimuli on subsequent aggressive behavior. Results showed that subjects who underwent both treatment conditions exhibited the most aggression. Bibliography and tables. (JB)

This study investigates the hypotheses set forth by Russian researchers that there may be identified a pervasive characteristic of the central nervous system labeled as "strength". Ten of the 12 measures used were direct replications of representative strength measures derived from the Russian work. Two additional measures were included to test…

To assess the effects of familiar social stimuli on arousal in a novel and mildly stressful environment, skin conductance was measured in 4-year-old nursery school children who experienced this environment under two conditions: (a) alone, and (b) in the presence of a close friend. The study was intended to test Zajonc's (1965) social facilitation…

In a study of 24 preterm and 24 full-term infants at 8 months, infants who reacted to a novel stimulus with increased vagal tone showed more focused examination and exhibited greater exploratory play range than those whose vagal tone decreased with the stimulus. (LB)

The parameters influencing the respiratory pattern at or near the threshold for hearing were studied in hearing impaired and normal hearing subjects. A semiautomatic system was designed to process the data. Results indicated that thresholds for pure tones could be estimated better on the inspiration phase of the breathing cycle and that duration…