In humans, cannabidiol (CBD), the primary non-addictive component of cannabis, is known to possess considerable therapeutic potential. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of CBD administration on reducing sound-induced fear in healthy domestic cats in a laboratory model of thunderstorm simulation. A total of 40 cats, each na & iuml;ve to the current testing, were randomly assigned into either of two administration groups (CBD and placebo). Each group was then exposed to the thunderstorm test twice; once at the beginning of the administration (the administration of CBD at 4.0 mg/kg/day over a 2-week-period or the administration of the same amount of sunflower oil as a placebo) and once after the end of the administration. When undesirable urination was observed, occurrences of this behaviour were found to decrease significantly when CBD was administered. However, no such changes were recorded when the placebo was administered. These results indicate that CBD could be an effective option for the treatment of noise-induced fear.

In humans, cannabidiol (CBD), the primary non-addictive component of cannabis, is known to possess considerable therapeutic potential. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of CBD administration on reducing sound-induced fear in healthy domestic cats in a laboratory model of thunderstorm simulation. A total of 40 cats, each naïve to the current testing, were randomly assigned into either of two administration groups (CBD and placebo). Each group was then exposed to the thunderstorm test twice; once at the beginning of the administration (the administration of CBD at 4.0 mg/kg/day over a 2-week-period or the administration of the same amount of sunflower oil as a placebo) and once after the end of the administration. When undesirable urination was observed, occurrences of this behaviour were found to decrease significantly when CBD was administered. However, no such changes were recorded when the placebo was administered. These results indicate that CBD could be an effective option for the treatment of noise-induced fear.

Human infants are faced with the daunting task of analysing the underlying structure of linguistic sound streams. For prelinguistic infants who lack any language-specific knowledge, the sound stream of language sounds almost the same as musical melody. Thus, it seems conceivable that musical ability helps language acquisition in prelinguistic infants. This conjecture is supported by empirical studies that show the contribution of musical properties of language, such as pitch contour and rhythmic structure, to language acquisition. Further, these studies indicate parallel developments of musical and linguistic abilities in human infants. As for musical ability in non-human species, existing studies show the close resemblance between humans and the other species in their ability to process frequency structure, which indicates that human language acquisition is assisted at least partly by this phylogenetically old function. At the same time, non-human species are far inferior to humans in their ability to perceive and reproduce rhythmic patterns. On the basis of these observations, we tentatively propose that the emergence of tight auditory-motor coupling in neural systems, which underlies sophisticated rhythmic processing, has enabled the evolution of speech communication and language in humans.

Women might experience modulation in their perception and cognition of colours and odours during the menstrual cycle, but how women's impressions of and correspondence between colours and odours differ according to the cycle changes remains unknown. Here, we experimentally examined women's performance of several tasks, including evaluation of impressions of colours and odours, matching/nonmatching of colours with odours, and identification of odours, comparing two phases: the beginning of menstruation and ovulation. The results showed that participants had similar impressions of colours and odours and made similar colour choices for odours in both the menstrual and ovulation phases, while "pleasant-unpleasant" impressions of colour and odour might vary according to the menstrual cycle. We found no significant differences in odour identification between the phases. The findings imply that hormonal changes during the menstrual cycle might affect "pleasant-unpleasant" impressions of colour and odour but not other features regarding impressions or crossmodal correspondence. In future studies, examination with a large number of participants is necessary.

We report membership change in a group of wild agile gibbons, Hylobates agilis agilis, in West Sumatra, Indonesia. During 6-month observational periods, we focused on a particular unit of individuals known as the B group. We confirmed that the group consisted of five individuals: one adult female, one adult male, one subadult male, one subadult female, and one infant male. During our observations, the resident adult male and the two subadult individuals dispersed or disappeared, and a new adult male took over the group. We examined the effects of the male replacement on the territorial boundary, using the auditory census technique. The boundary was stable. We also documented the succession of the home range. Our results indicate a flexible social structure in this species and contribute some useful data to an ongoing debate on their social dynamics.

Humans recognize the self in various visual domains, such as faces, names, and motions, as well as in products, such as handwritten letters. Previous studies have indicated that these various domains of self are represented differently in the brain, i.e., domain-specific self-representation. However, it remains unclear whether these differences in brain activation are due to the processing of different visual features or to differential self-processing among the domains, because the studies used different types of visual stimuli. The present study evaluated event-related potentials (ERPs) while participants were presented with their own and others’ names generated by the participants themselves or someone else. Therefore, the visual stimuli included two domains of self-related information, name and motor agent, but only one type of stimulus (handwritten names). The ERP results show that the amplitudes of the P250 component (250–330 ms) in the posterior regions were smaller for self-generated handwritten names than for non-self-generated handwritten names. The results also show that the amplitudes of the P300 component (350–500 ms) were larger for the self-name than for the non-self-name. These results suggest domain-specific processing of self-related information regarding the name and agent of handwritten stimuli.

BACKGROUND:Prioritization of the processing of threatening stimuli induces deleterious effects on task performance. However, emotion evoked by viewing images of snakes exerts a facilitating effect upon making judgments of their color in neurotypical adults and schoolchildren. We attempted to confirm this in school and preschool children with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). METHODS:Forty French children participated and corresponded to two age groups: a group of schoolchildren and a group of preschool children, each group including 10 children with typical development and 10 children with ASD. Each participant was exposed to 120 trials composed of 20 photographs of snakes and 20 photographs of flowers, each of which appeared 3 times (in red, green and blue). Participants were asked to indicate the color of each image as quickly as possible via key-press. A three-way analysis of variance test for reaction time (RT) considering image type (IMAGE), participant group (PARTICIPANT), and age (AGE) as main effects and its interaction terms was performed for each subject. RESULTS:When the reaction time required to respond to presented stimuli was measured, schoolchildren tended to respond faster when stimuli were snake images than when stimuli were flower images whether the children had or did not have ASD. For the 5-to-6-year-old preschool participants, the difference between reaction time for the color-naming of snake images and flower images was ambiguous overall. CONCLUSIONS:There were possible odd color-specific effects in children with ASD when images were presented to the children in green. Implications of the findings are argued with respect to active avoidance or attraction as one of the behavioral characteristics commonly noted in children with ASD.

Traffic signals, i.e., iconic symbols conveying traffic rules, generally represent spatial or movement meanings, e.g., “Stop”, “Go”, “Bend warning”, or “No entry”, and we visually perceive these symbols and produce appropriate bodily actions. The traffic signals are clearly thought to assist in producing bodily actions such as going forward or stopping, and the combination of symbolic recognition through visual perception and production of bodily actions could be one example of embodied cognition. However, to what extent our bodily actions are associated with the symbolic representations of commonly used traffic signals remains unknown. Here we experimentally investigated how traffic symbol recognition cognitively affects bodily action patterns, by employing a simple stimulus-response task for traffic sign recognition with a response of either sliding or pushing down on a joystick in a gamepad. We found that when operating the joystick, participants’ slide reaction in response to the “Go” traffic symbol was significantly faster than their push reaction, while their response time to the “Stop” signal showed no differences between sliding and pushing actions. These results suggested that there was a possible association between certain action patterns and traffic symbol recognition, and in particular the “Go” symbol was congruent with a sliding action as a bodily response. Our findings may thus reveal an example of embodied cognition in visual perception of traffic signals.

Angry faces capture humans' attention more rapidly than emotionally positive facial expressions-a phenomenon known as the Anger Superiority Effect (ASE). Past studies have reported that individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) show ASE, but that apparently atypical mechanisms seemed to underlie. In the present study, we assumed that for ASDs who tend to process faces in a feature-based manner, single facial features would activate systems implicated in facilitated processing for angry faces. To test this assumption, we examined ASE in children with and without ASD by a visual search paradigm using schematic drawings of whole face, eyebrows-only, or mouth-only as stimuli. Results revealed that only ASD children showed rapid detection of anger over happiness (i.e., ASE) for the mouth-only condition, whereas both groups showed clear ASE for the whole face and eyebrows-only conditions. Furthermore, individuals with ASD who showed more local-based perceptual characteristics, assessed by a Navon task, also showed stronger ASE for the mouth-only condition. These findings suggest that extracting facial features and perceiving emotions are fundamental to ASE in ASD.

Accumulated evidence indicates that cannabidiol (CBD), a nonpsychotomimetic and nonaddictive main component of the Cannabis sativa plant, reverses anxiety-like behavior. The purpose of the present study was to assess the efficacy of CBD treatment for Japanese late teenagers with social anxiety disorder (SAD). Thirty-seven 18-19-year-old Japanese teenagers with SAD and avoidant personality disorder received, in a double-blind study, cannabis oil (n = 17) containing 300 mg CBD or placebo (n = 20) daily for 4 weeks. SAD symptoms were measured at the beginning and end of the treatment period using the Fear of Negative Evaluation Questionnaire and the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale. CBD significantly decreased anxiety measured by both scales. The results indicate that CBD could be a useful option to treat social anxiety.

Women might have changes in perception and cognition of colours according to hormonal changes during the menstrual cycle. Colours are often associated with specific emotional facial expressions, but how these two factors interact with each other and differ according to the cycle has remained unclear. We investigated attentional interference between colours and emotional facial expressions for women in the menstrual compared to the ovulation phases by colour judgment based on the Stroop tasks. Participants identified the colours (either red, yellow, or blue) of three types of face stimuli (happy, neutral, or sad) and corresponding scrambled face stimuli by pressing buttons, and we recorded participants' reaction times. The results showed better performance in the menstrual phase than in the ovulation phase. An interference effect was not observed. However, in the scrambled face stimuli task, only the reaction time for happy scrambled face shape and red did not differ between the phases. Thus, participants might pay stronger attention to faces with colours in the menstrual phase than in the ovulation phase but weaker attention to scrambled face shapes in the menstrual phase.

Female hormones affect perception, cognition and mental condition of women in the menstrual cycle and menopause. However, how menopause affects colour perception, and whether mental condition, especially depression, is related to colour perception remain unclear. Here, we investigated the influences of menopause on colour perception, recording the response times to three types of face and scrambled face stimuli: happy, neutral and sad, with three colours: red, yellow and blue. We predicted that colour perception of participants would be interfered with and delayed by emotional facial expression, as emotional facial expressions are connected with specific colours. We also examined depression states in women using the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D Scale) to understand the relationship between colour perception and depression. Fifty-nine female participants participated in the experiments. We analysed the data of 23 pre-menopausal and 20 post-menopausal participants. The results showed that the pre-menopausal women reacted to all stimuli faster than the post-menopausal women, and the post-menopausal women reacted to only blue significantly more slowly than to the other colours. Colour perception had no clear association with reaction time to emotional facial expression or with depression. The results suggest that menopause could influence colour perception of women as one of the possible factors, as well as aging, with such influence, and imply that the perceptual differences of blue between pre- and post-menopausal women result from a deficit in short wavelength sensitivity cones possibly caused by menopause-associated hormonal changes.

Neurodiversity refers to the notion that seemingly ‘impaired’ cognitive as well as emotional features characteristic of developmental disorders such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD) fall into normal human behavioral variations that should enjoy some selective advantages. In the present experiment, the author compared what was depicted in subjects’ drawings after they experienced an identical event, e.g., going on a picnic to a garden in the vicinity of their nursery school, between children with ASD and IQ-matched, typically developing (TD) children. When the material was coded according to types of drawn objects, such as human, animal, plant, food, vehicle, building, and others, the overall variability of the objects did not differ between TD children and children with ASD. However, TD children were more likely than children with ASD to depict human images. Conversely, other objects were more likely to be drawn by children with ASD than by TD children. While TD children were more likely to focus on humans than on non-human objects when drawing, children with ASD were more likely to focus on non-human objects than on humans even after both had experienced an identical event. The author argues that such findings are empirical evidence for the claim that there is some selective advantage of enhanced capabilities characteristic of ASD, i.e., neurodiversity, that may represent a balance toward “folk physics” at the expense of “folk psychology.”

In humans, attentional biases have been shown to negative (dangerous animals, physical threat) and positive (high caloric food, alcohol) stimuli. However, it is not clear whether these attentional biases reflect on stimulus driven, bottom up, or goal driven, top down, attentional processes. Here we show that, like humans, Japanese macaques show an attentional bias to snakes in a dot probe task (Experiment 1). Moreover, this attentional bias reflects on bottom up driven, preferential engagement of attention by snake images (Experiment 2a), a finding that was replicated in a study that used the same methodology in humans (Experiment 2b). These results are consistent with the notion that attentional bias to snakes reflects on an evolutionarily old, stimulus driven threat detection mechanism which is found in both species.

Cross-modal correspondences in the human sensory systems often appear for different levels of sensory inputs, such as colour and odour. However, whether there is hormonal modification of such colour-odour correspondence has remained unclear. Here, we experimentally investigated the influence of hormonal changes in menopausal women by conducting evaluations of colour and odour impressions, matching tasks between colour and odour, and odor identification tasks, comparing two groups of women: premenopausal and postmenopausal. The results showed that both premenopausal and postmenopausal women had similar impressions and images of colours for odors, while postmenopausal women had significantly lower abilities of odor identification than premenopausal women. This suggested that the degree of conviction about an odor's identification might slightly affect the subjects' impressions of odors and their corresponding colour choices. Menopause might not directly affect cognitive aspects regarding colour or odor, but might instead affect their perceptions.

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