Experimental performance evaluation of a 4.59- inch radial-inflow turbine over a range of Reynolds number

Effect of Reynolds number on performance of 4.59-inch tip diameter radial inflow turbin

Habituation and the Aesthetics of Disenchantment in Proust’s Search of Lost Time vols. I-II

Habit is a central theme for Proust. The rich discourse on habit died in the early twentieth century, and little has been written about habit in Proust since. Proust’s understanding of habit stems from the philosophical traditions of habit and memory; he reproduces these ideas to draw the crucial connection between habit and disenchantment

What Are You Feeling? Using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging to Assess the Modulation of Sensory and Affective Responses during Empathy for Pain

BACKGROUND: Recent neuroscientific evidence suggests that empathy for pain activates similar neural representations as the first-hand experience of pain. However, empathy is not an all-or-none phenomenon but it is strongly malleable by interpersonal, intrapersonal and situational factors. This study investigated how two different top-down mechanisms - attention and cognitive appraisal - affect the perception of pain in others and its neural underpinnings. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: We performed one behavioral (N = 23) and two functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments (N = 18). In the first fMRI experiment, participants watched photographs displaying painful needle injections, and were asked to evaluate either the sensory or the affective consequences of these injections. The role of cognitive appraisal was examined in a second fMRI experiment in which participants watched injections that only appeared to be painful as they were performed on an anesthetized hand. Perceiving pain in others activated the affective-motivational and sensory-discriminative aspects of the pain matrix. Activity in the somatosensory areas was specifically enhanced when participants evaluated the sensory consequences of pain. Perceiving non-painful injections into the anesthetized hand also led to signal increase in large parts of the pain matrix, suggesting an automatic affective response to the putatively harmful stimulus. This automatic response was modulated by areas involved in self/other distinction and valence attribution - including the temporo-parietal junction and medial orbitofrontal cortex. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: Our findings elucidate how top-down control mechanisms and automatic bottom-up processes interact to generate and modulate other-oriented responses. They stress the role of cognitive processing in empathy, and shed light on how emotional and bodily awareness enable us to evaluate the sensory and affective states of others

A meta-analysis of individual differences in humor production and personality

One main area of focus in humor production research is exploring individual differences in humor production ability (i.e., the ability to produce something funny on the spot), particularly via its relationship with personality. The last 40 years of research, however, has reported conflicting results. Earlier work on individual differences in humor production and personality suggests that extraversion is the most closely related trait to humor production of the Big 5 personality traits. More recent work, however, suggests that openness to experience has the strongest relationship with humor production, and that extraversion has little to no relationship with the ability to produce something funny. The reason for this inconsistency is unclear, but one factor that may contribute to the issue is the between-study variation in assessment of humor production ability and experiment design. One way to resolve this inconsistency is to conduct a research synthesis using meta-analysis, which has two advantages for clarifying the humor production and personality literature: first, it statistically aggregates the findings of completed research in a way that increases statistical power beyond that of the individual studies included in the analysis, and second, it allows for comparison across studies, meaning that random error included in an individual study can be modeled as meaningful variation due to systematic between-study differences. Therefore, the present research meta-analyzed 15 different studies (totaling 56 reported effect sizes) to explore how individual differences in humor production ability relate to personality. Of the Big 5 traits, only openness to experience significantly correlated with humor production ability. Moderation analyses revealed that while the number of tasks and number of response raters did not have an impact on the size of the openness and humor production effect, the way that humor production ability was modeled did significantly affect the size of the study-level correlation. Finally, moderation analyses revealed that newer assessments of humor production ability did not significantly differ from more traditional assessments. Practical and theoretical implications of these findings for future research are discussed

Listening between the notes: personality, listening context, and aesthetic chills in everyday music listening

Why do people get chills in response to music? Most people report feeling chills — experienced as goose bumps, shivers down the spine, or hair standing on end — at least sometimes when listening to music, but a small minority of people say they've never had this experience. Past work indicates that personality, experience, and engagement in music are partially responsible for individual differences in the experience of chills in response to music, but there is still significant variance in chills that is unexplained. In the present study, experience sampling methods were used to better understand the within-person variability in the experience of chills. Eighty-nine undergraduates completed surveys of Big Five personality traits and music preferences, habits, and experience. For one week, participants responded to multiple daily surveys asking about activities, emotions, and environment, with an emphasis on music listening and chills. Hierarchical linear modeling was used to estimate several models of the variability in chills. Several factors of music listening were examined as potential predictors of chills, including the location, involvement of friends, music choice, structural components of the music, purpose of music listening, and concurrent activities. Of these, music that had special meaning and music that was instrumental had significant main effects on the occurrence of chills, as did taking more music classes and scoring high in facets of neuroticism and openness to experience. In addition, neuroticism and openness facets significantly interacted with contextual aspects of music listening, such as music familiarity, paying close attention to the music, and listening on headphones. Directions for future theorizing are discussed

Going Beyond Rote Auditory Learning: Neural Patterns of Generalized Auditory Learning

The ability to generalize across specific experiences is vital for the recognition of new patterns, especially in speech perception considering acoustic–phonetic pattern variability. Indeed, behavioral research has demonstrated that listeners are able via a process of generalized learning to leverage their experiences of past words said by difficult-to-understand talker to improve their understanding for new words said by that talker. Here, we examine differences in neural responses to generalized versus rote learning in auditory cortical processing by training listeners to understand a novel synthetic talker. Using a pretest–posttest design with EEG, participants were trained using either (1) a large inventory of words where no words were repeated across the experiment (generalized learning) or (2) a small inventory of words where words were repeated (rote learning). Analysis of long-latency auditory evoked potentials at pretest and posttest revealed that rote and generalized learning both produced rapid changes in auditory processing, yet the nature of these changes differed. Generalized learning was marked by an amplitude reduction in the N1–P2 complex and by the presence of a late negativity wave in the auditory evoked potential following training; rote learning was marked only by temporally later scalp topography differences. The early N1–P2 change, found only for generalized learning, is consistent with an active processing account of speech perception, which proposes that the ability to rapidly adjust to the specific vocal characteristics of a new talker (for which rote learning is rare) relies on attentional mechanisms to selectively modify early auditory processing sensitivity

Are openness and intellect distinct aspects of openness to experience? A test of the O/I model.

The Openness/Intellect (O/I) model proposes that Openness to Experience has two major facets—Openness and Intellect—that can be measured with the Big Five Aspect Scales (BFAS). Thus far, however, research has not shown distinct, unique relationships between the Openness and Intellect aspects and other outcomes. The present research evaluated the relationships between Openness and Intellect with two outcomes: creative behavior and achievement (conceptually closer to Openness) and fluid intelligence (conceptually closer to Intellect). Young adults completed the BFAS, several measures of fluid intelligence, and several measures of creative achievement. Latent variable models indicated that the Openness aspect significantly predicted creativity but not fluid intelligence; the Intellect aspect, in contrast, significantly predicted fluid intelligence but not creativity. The findings thus offer support for the validity of the O/I model