Using appropriate stimuli to evoke emotions is especially important for researching emotion. Psychologists have provided several standardized affective stimulus databases-such as the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) and the Nencki Affective Picture System (NAPS) as visual stimulus databases, as well as the International Affective Digitized Sounds (IADS) and the Montreal Affective Voices as auditory stimulus databases for emotional experiments. However, considering the limitations of the existing auditory stimulus database studies, research using auditory stimuli is relatively limited compared with the studies using visual stimuli. First, the number of sample sounds is limited, making it difficult to equate across emotional conditions and semantic categories. Second, some artificially created materials (music or human voice) may fail to accurately drive the intended emotional processes. Our principal aim was to expand existing auditory affective sample database to sufficiently cover natural sounds. We asked 207 participants to rate 935 sounds (including the sounds from the IADS-2) using the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) and three basic-emotion rating scales. The results showed that emotions in sounds can be distinguished on the affective rating scales, and the stability of the evaluations of sounds revealed that we have successfully provided a larger corpus of natural, emotionally evocative auditory stimuli, covering a wide range of semantic categories. Our expanded, standardized sound sample database may promote a wide range of research in auditory systems and the possible interactions with other sensory modalities, encouraging direct reliable comparisons of outcomes from different researchers in the field of psychology.

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The authors investigated whether self-knowledge has a function to reduce conflict by biasing one of two choices during occupational choice (e.g., Which occupation do you think you could do better?-dancer or chemist). In the three experiments, event-related brain potentials were recorded. Experiment 1 revealed that the amplitude of the conflict-related negativity (CRN) reflects strength of conflict during occupational choice. Results of Experiment 2 demonstrated that the CRN amplitude during occupational choice was smaller when self-knowledge was activated than when other-knowledge was activated. Experiment 3 showed that the CRN amplitude during occupational choice was decreased more when self-knowledge that biases one choice of occupation was activated than when self-knowledge that does not bias was activated. These results suggest that self-knowledge reduces conflict by biasing one of multiple choices in situations where two or more possible correct answers can be given.

Objective: To determine how cortical compensation occurs in higher cognitive systems during the recovery phase of diffuse axonal injury (DAI). Design: 12 right-handed patients with a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) lesion pattern compatible with pure DAI were identified. Pure DAI was defined as finding of traumatic microbleeds on T2*-weighted gradient-echo images in the absence of otherwise traumatic or non-traumatic MRI abnormalities. 12 matched healthy controls were also enrolled. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to assess brain activation during a working memory test (Paced Visual Serial Attention Test (PVSAT)). Results: No significant group differences were observed in reaction times for the PVSAT. Although patients with pure DAI committed a few errors during the PVSAT, controls respond correctly to each probe. Controls showed activations in the left frontal gyrus, left parietal gyrus and right inferior parietal gyrus. Patients with pure DAI showed activations in the left inferior frontal gyrus, right inferior frontal gyrus and right middle frontal gyrus. Between-group analysis of the PVSAT task showed significantly greater activation of the right inferior frontal gyrus (BA 45) and right middle frontal gyrus (BA 9) in patient with pure DAI versus controls. Conclusions: Patients with pure DAI require compensatory activation of the contralateral (right) prefrontal region to carry out activities similar to healthy controls. These findings provide further evidence for the adaptive capacity of neuronal systems and brain plasticity during the recovery stages of DAI.

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