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Emotions are highly influential to many psychological processes. Indeed, research employing emotional stimuli is rapidly escalating across the field of psychology. However, challenges remain regarding discrete evocation of frequently co-elicited emotions such as amusement and happiness, or anger and disgust. Further, as much contemporary work in emotion employs college students, we sought to additionally evaluate the efficacy of film clips to discretely elicit these more challenging emotions in a young adult population using an online medium. The internet is an important tool for investigating responses to emotional stimuli, but validations of emotionally evocative film clips across laboratory and webbased settings are limited in the literature. An additional obstacle is identifying stimuli amidst the numerous film clip validation studies. During our investigation, we recognized the lack of a categorical database to facilitate rapid identification of useful film clips for individual researchers' unique investigations. Consequently, here we also sought to produce the first compilation of such stimuli into an accessible and comprehensive catalog. We based our catalog upon prior work as well as our own, and identified 24 articles and 295 film clips from four decades of research. We present information on the validation of these clips in addition to our own research validating six clips using online administration settings. The results of our search in the literature and our own study are presented in tables designed to facilitate and improve a selection of highly valid film stimuli for future research.Keywords Emotion . Film . Stimuli . Emotion elicitationThe study of emotion in relation to cognition, behavior, and health has grown exponentially over the last several decades. Indeed, emotion responses and emotion regulatory strategies are increasingly recognized as central to many, if not most, psychological processes. As such, there is a growing reliance on laboratory paradigms employing emotional stimuli to induce, alter, or simulate emotional contexts for investigation across the social sciences and, most notably, in psychology. Although there are currently a variety of methods used including emotional images (e.g., International Affective Picture System: Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 2008), music (Koelsch, 2010;Logeswaran & Bhattacharya, 2009), and personal recollection (e.g., Lench & Levine, 2005;Papa & Bonanno, 2008), there is an increasing reliance on emotional film clips. For example, a search for Bemotion elicitation^and Bfilm clips^on Google Scholar and on psychology-specific databases (e.g., APA) yielded over 1,000 results. The use of film clips for emotion elicitation has many advantages. Clips are easily standardized and therefore reliable as compared to idiographic methods (e.g., personal recollection; see Mills & D'Mello 2014;Salas, Radovic, & Turnbull, 2012). Film clips readily engage participants for extended periods and allow for an ecologically valid induction, progression, and assessment o...

Although generalization to conditioned stimuli is not a new phenomenon, renewed interest in understanding its biological underpinning has stemmed from its association with a number of anxiety disorders. Generalization as it relates to fear processing is a temporally dynamic process in which animals, including humans, display fear in response to similar yet distinct cues or contexts as the time between training and testing increases. This Review surveys the literature on contextual fear generalization and its relation to several views of memory, including systems consolidation, forgetting, and transformation hypothesis, which differentially implicate roles of the hippocampus and neocortex in memory consolidation and retrieval. We discuss recent evidence on the neurobiological mechanisms contributing to the increase in fear generalization over time and how generalized responding may be modulated by acquisition, consolidation, and retrieval mechanisms. Whereas clinical perspectives of generalization emphasize a lack of fear inhibition to CS cues or fear toward intermediate CS cues, the time-dependent nature of generalization and its relation to traditional views on memory consolidation and retrieval are often overlooked. Understanding the time-dependent increase in fear generalization has important implications not only for understanding how generalization contributes to anxiety disorders but also for understanding basic long-term memory function. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Thyroid hormone (TH) plays a fundamental role in thermoregulation, yet the molecular mediators of its effects are not fully defined. Recently, skeletal muscle (SKM) uncoupling protein (UCP) 3 was shown to be an important mediator of the thermogenic effects of the widely abused sympathomimetic agents 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA; Ecstasy) and methamphetamine. Expression of UCP3 is regulated by TH. Activation of UCP3 is indirectly regulated by norepinephrine (NE) and is dependent upon the availability of free fatty acids (FFAs). We hypothesized that UCP3 may be a molecular link between TH and hyperthermia, requiring increased levels of both NE and FFAs to accomplish the thermogenic effect. Here, we demonstrate that MDMA (40 mg/kg s.c.) significantly increases plasma FFA levels 30 min after treatment. Pharmacologically increasing NE levels through the inhibition of phenylethanolamine N-methyltransferase with Ϯ2,3-dichloro-␣-methylbenzylamine potentiated the hyperthermic effects of a 20 mg/kg dose of MDMA. Using Western blots and regression analysis, we further illustrated that chronic hyperthyroidism in rats potentiates the hyperthermic effects of MDMA and increases levels of SKM UCP3 protein in a linear fashion according to levels of circulating plasma TH. Conversely, chronic hypothyroidism results in a hypothermic response to MDMA that is directly proportionate to decreased UCP3 expression. Acute TH supplementation did not change the skeletal muscle UCP3 expression levels or temperature responses to MDMA. These findings suggest that, although MDMA-induced hyperthermia appears to result from increased NE and FFA levels, susceptibility is ultimately determined by TH regulation of UCP3-dependent thermogenesis.Hyperthermia results from a severe, unregulated rise in core body temperature induced by high ambient temperature, strenuous exercise, endocrinopathy, or drug exposure. To our knowledge, no drug treatment has been established through controlled trials as an efficacious therapy for conditions that involve severe hyperthermia, with the exception of malignant hyperthermia, which is effectively reversed with dantrolene (Blank and Boggs, 1993). The lack of therapeutic options for the management of hyperthermia probably results from an inadequate understanding of the basic molecular mechanisms of thermogenesis.The principal active thyroid hormone (TH) 3,5,3Ј-triiodo-Lthyronine is formed from the precursor 3,5,3Ј,5Ј-tetraiodothyronine (T 4 , thyroxine) by deiodinases present in various tissues (Bianco and Larsen, 2005). Although TH has been established as the primary endocrinologic regulator of body temperature (Silva, 2005) and facultative thermogenesis (FT) (for review see Lowell and Spiegelman, 2000), the mechanisms involved are complex and incompletely characterized. One family of genes regulated by TH (Gong et al., 1997) and believed to play a significant role in FT encodes for the mitochondrial uncoupling proteins (UCPs).UCPs "uncouple" free energy stored in the mitochondrial electrochemical p...

A variety of human and animal studies support the hypothesis that serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine or 5-HT) system dysfunction is a contributing factor to the development of autism in some patients. However, many questions remain about how developmental manipulation of various components that influence 5-HT signaling (5-HT synthesis, transport, metabolism) persistently impair social behaviors. This review will summarize key aspects of central 5-HT function important for normal brain development, and review evidence implicating perinatal disruptions in 5-HT signaling in the pathophysiology of autism spectrum disorder. We discuss the importance, and relative dearth, of studies that explore the possible correlation to autism in the interactions between important intrinsic and extrinsic factors that may disrupt 5-HT homeostasis during development. In particular, we focus on exposure to 5-HT transport altering mechanisms such as selective serotonin-reuptake inhibitors or genetic polymorphisms in primary or auxiliary transporters of 5-HT, and how they relate to neurological stores of serotonin and its precursors. A deeper understanding of the many mechanisms by which 5-HT signaling can be disrupted, alone and in concert, may contribute to an improved understanding of the etiologies and heterogeneous nature of this disorder. We postulate that extreme bidirectional perturbations of these factors during development likely compound or synergize to facilitate enduring neurochemical changes resulting in insufficient or excessive 5-HT signaling, that could underlie the persistent behavioral characteristics of autism spectrum disorder.