ABSTRACT
Cortical areas involved in processing of emotional prosody (EP) in spoken language, such as joy or sadness, have been found in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies bilaterally or dominantly in the right frontal or temporal lobes. In this study, we investigated spatiotemporal patterns of cortical activity related to EP processing using magnetoencephalography (MEG). In this experiment, a joyful face (JF) or a sad face (SF) was displayed after voices which had emotional features of joy (joy prosody: JP) or sadness (sad prosody: SP) were presented. Subjects were requested to judge whether emotional features of the voice and the face were identical or not. MEG signals evoked by emotional voices were measured and significant differences of cortical activities associated with processing of emotional feature were observed between the right and left hemisphere during the latency of 100-150 ms that includes the N1m component. Our study suggests that MEG is a useful method, in addition to fMRI and event-related scalp potentials (ERP) for studying non-invasively EP processing in the human brain.
Subject(s)
Auditory Cortex/physiology , Emotions/physiology , Evoked Potentials, Auditory/physiology , Magnetoencephalography/methods , Recognition, Psychology/physiology , Acoustic Stimulation/methods , Adult , Brain Mapping/methods , Female , Humans , Male , Research DesignABSTRACT
A drug delivery system (DDS) consisting of lipopolysaccharide (LPS) as a drug and 2-hydroxyethyl methacrylate (HEMA)-diethylene glycol dimethacrylate (2G) or -polyethylene glycol dimethacrylate (4G, 9G) copolymer was prepared, and used for the efficient preparation of an experimental animal model of chronic hyper-endotoxemia. The release profiles of LPS in the in-vitro test were greatly influenced by the composition of HEMA-2G, 4G, 9G in the copolymer. It was found that LPS release from the DDS continued gradually and constantly throughout 2 weeks. In the in-vivo experiment with rats, the DDS maintained a high blood concentration level of LPS for 3 days. These results strongly suggest the possibility of convenient and reproducible preparation of a chronic hyper-endotoxemia animal model.
