Existential Neuroscience: a field in search of meaning

This study is based on a different reaction to mortality salience, one that is derived from evolutionary psychology: the drive to reproduce. The heterosexual participants in the study viewed attractive opposite-sex faces and made decisions about whether they would like to meet them (a proxy for sexual desire) after being primed by death-related words (or not). Already, this seems like a bridge too far, but let us go on.Sixteen female and 16 male subjects participated in this fMRI experiment. They viewed a series of attractive faces (as judged by an independent group of participants) and decided, in separate blocks, if the faces were attractive or not (explicit evaluation) or whether they'd like to meet the person or not ("implicit" evaluation). The task was cued at the beginning of a block by the words Meet? or Attractive? Participants make their choice when the ? appears on the monitor. Below is an example of the implicit no-prime condition shown to the male subjects.Fig 1 (Silveira et al., 2013).The participants viewed a blank screen before each face is presented, instead of viewing control words that are unrelated to death. The lack of such a control condition is problematic, as we'll see later. For comparison, an example of the death-prime condition is illustrated below.modified from Fig 1 (Silveira et al., 2013). I added two English translations for the original German exemplars that were given in the text .Here we can see the participants are reading words, a condition ...
Source: The Neurocritic - Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: Source Type: blogs