Biomedical subjects

Aaron R Duley

Publications and source records attributed to Aaron R Duley.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2005

Influences of age on emotional reactivity during picture processing.

We compared emotional reactivity to affective pictures for 32 older (60-71 years) and 34 younger (18-23 years) adults. We collected the startle-blink reflex, N1 and P3 components of the probe-evoked event-related brain potential, corrugator electromyogram, heart rate, and self-report measures of pleasure and arousal. Self-report findings indicated that older, compared with younger, adults reported greater overall pleasure and arousal. Older adults also exhibited decreased N1 and P3 amplitude, corrugator activity, and heart rate deceleration compared with younger adults. The startle-blink reflex revealed that older adults exhibited increased startle-blink magnitude compared with younger adults during unpleasant pictures, with no age differences observed for pleasant and neutral contents. These age differences suggest that older adults have differential reactivity to affective picture viewing, and they indicate that age-related changes in emotion are not unitary across response systems.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2005

Emotion and motor control: movement attributes following affective picture processing.

The authors investigated the impact of emotion on the performance of a square-tracing task after participants (N = 40) were exposed to pleasant (P), unpleasant (U), and neutral (N) pictures. Physiological and self-report measures indexed affective valence and arousal. In Experiment 1, greater error followed exposure to 4 consecutive U images than exposure to 4 consecutive P images. Speed of performance did not vary as a function of valence. In Experiment 2, participants viewed 1 slide per trial within a modified exposure protocol. Speed of performance varied as a function of valence; faster performance followed U relative to P stimuli. Accuracy of performance did not vary between conditions. Corresponding self-report and physiological measures generally corroborated previous evidence. Findings collectively indicated that the length of exposure to affective stimuli mediates speed and accuracy of motor performance; compared with P stimuli, U stimuli led to either increased error (short exposure) or increased speed (multiple exposures). The authors conclude that brief and extended exposures to affective pictures have direct behavioral consequences, and they discuss the implications of that finding.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2004

Adults with dyslexia: theta power changes during performance of a sequential motor task.

Performance deficits during cerebellar intensive motor tasks maybe reflected by discrepant theta activity in the cerebral cortex. The present experiment examined the relationship between performance on a novel motor task and theta activity in adults with developmental dyslexia (DD) and an age- and IQ-matched control group (CG). Time-locked tonic and phasic lower and upper theta measures were derived and separate event-related theta band power (ERBP) scores were calculated for each of three experimental trials. The DD made significantly more errors than CG during Trials 1 and 2 of the motor task. Tonic theta did not differ between groups; however, the DD group displayed a significant decrease in ERBP across all trials and sites, specifically in central and parietal regions during Trial 3. No significant behavioral or physiological evidence supported the notion of conscious compensation (CC). Rather, deficient task performance in the DD group was associated with a general inability to recruit sufficient working memory processes.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2004

An open-source LabVIEW application toolkit for phasic heart rate analysis in psychophysiological research.

The cardiovascular system has been extensively measured in a variety of research and clinical domains. Despite technological and methodological advances in cardiovascular science, the analysis and evaluation of phasic changes in heart rate persists as a way to assess numerous psychological concomitants. Some researchers, however, have pointed to constraints on data analysis when evaluating cardiac activity indexed by heart rate or heart period. Thus, an off-line application toolkit for heart rate analysis is presented. The program, written with National Instruments' LabVIEW, incorporates a variety of tools for off-line extraction and analysis of heart rate data. Current methods and issues concerning heart rate analysis are highlighted, and how the toolkit provides a flexible environment to ameliorate common problems that typically lead to trial rejection is discussed. Source code for this program may be downloaded from the Psychonomic Society Web archive at www.psychonomic.org/archive/.

Heart Rate↗