The present study sought to explore the effect of romantic relationships on the attractiveness evaluation of one’s own face using two experiments with the probability evaluation and the subjective rating method. Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 enrolled couples and single individuals as participants, respectively. The results of the two experiments indicated that the participants evaluated their own face as significantly more attractive than did others of the same sex. More importantly, the romantic relationship enhanced the positive bias in the evaluation of self-face attractiveness, that is, couple participants showed a stronger positive bias than did single individuals. It was also found that a person in a romantic relationship was prone to overestimating the attractiveness of his or her lover’s face, from the perspective of both probability evaluation and rating score. However, the abovementioned overestimation did not surpass the evaluations of the exaggeratedly attractive face. The present results supported the observer hypothesis, demonstrating the romantic relationship to be an important influential factor of facial attractiveness. Our findings have important implications for the research of self-face evaluation.

Background The subclassification of prolonged disorders of consciousness (DoC) based on sleep patterns is important for the evaluation and treatment of the disease. This study evaluates the correlation between polysomnographic patterns and the efficacy of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) in patients with prolonged DoC due to stroke. Methods In total, 33 patients in the vegetative state (VS) with sleep cycles or without sleep cycles were randomly assigned to either active or sham tDCS groups. Polysomnography was used to monitor sleep changes before and after intervention. Additionally, clinical scale scores and electroencephalogram (EEG) analysis were performed before and after intervention to evaluate the efficacy of tDCS on the patients subclassified according to their sleep patterns. Results The results suggest that tDCS improved the sleep structure, significantly prolonged total sleep time (TST) (95%CI: 14.387–283.527, P = 0.013) and NREM sleep stage 2 (95%CI: 3.157–246.165, P = 0.040) of the VS patients with sleep cycles. It also significantly enhanced brain function of patients with sleep cycles, which were reflected by the increased clinical scores (95%CI: 0.340–3.440, P < 0.001), the EEG powers and functional connectivity in the brain and the 6-month prognosis. Moreover, the changes in NREM sleep stage 2 had a significant positive correlation with each index of the β band. Conclusion This study reveals the importance of sleep patterns in the prognosis and treatment of prolonged DoC and provides new evidence for the efficacy of tDCS in post-stroke patients with VS patients subclassified by sleep pattern. Trial registration URL: https://www.clinicaltrials.gov. Unique identifier: NCT03809936. Registered 18 January 2019

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Because of the undesired fatigue-related consequences, accumulating efforts have been made to find an effective intervention to alleviate the suboptimal cognitive function caused by mental fatigue. Nonetheless, limitations of intervention and evaluation methods may hinder the revealing of underlying neural mechanisms of fatigue recovery. Through the newlydeveloped dynamic functional connectivity (FC) analysis framework, this study aims to investigate the effects of two types of mid-task interventions (i.e., rest-break and moderate-intensity exercise-break) on the dynamic reorganization of FC during the execution of psychomotor vigilance test (PVT). Using a sliding window approach, temporal brain networks within each frequency band (i.e., δ, θ, α, & β) were estimated before and immediate after the intervention, and towards the end of the task to investigate the immediate and delayed effects respectively during post-break task reengagement. Behaviourally, similar beneficial effects of exercise-and rest-break on performance were observed, manifested by the immediate improvements after both interventions and a long-lasting influence towards the end of tasks. Moreover, temporal brain networks assessment showed significant immediate decreases of fluctuability, which followed by an increase of fluctuability towards the end of intervention tasks. Furthermore, the temporal nodal measure revealed the channels with significant differences across tasks were mainly resided in the fronto-parietal areas that exhibited interesting frequency-dependent distribution. The observations of immediate and delayed dynamic FC reorganizations extend previous fatiguerelated intervention and static FC studies, and provide new insight into the dynamic characteristics of FC during post-break task reengagement.