[Physiological and psychopathological aspects of eating behavior]. / Aspetti fisiologici e psicopatologici della condotta alimentare.

Eating behaviour variations are often observed in medical practice. Sometimes they are physiological manifestations, rarely they are paraphysiological, many times they amount to pathological behaviour. Their heterogeneity could account for treatment problems met by the family doctor. Our study was aimed to increase the family doctor's attention to the eating behaviour of their patients. Greater awareness in family doctors of problems in their patients' eating behaviour may be apt to lead to an improvement in dietary habits and consequently to greater psychologic and physical wellbeing of the patients.

Acoustic and electrically elicited startle reaction: similar patterns of habituation and reflex modifications in humans.

The present study was performed in order to verify two relevant phenomena related to Startle Reaction in normal subjects: 1) the response habituation, that consists of an exponential decrement of the R2 component of Blink Reflex after repeated identical stimuli, and 2) the modification of R1 magnitude, R2 magnitude and latency when the startle eliciting stimulus is preceded by a warning stimulus. Our data confirm: 1) that habituation is independent of paradigm and type of stimulation (acoustic vs electrocutaneous), and 2) an electrical prestimulus has a facilitatory effect on the R2 latency of the electrically elicited Blink Reflex onset with an inhibition of R2 magnitude. The present study support the view of a systemic supramodal central mechanism of information processing and sensorial gating with super-imposable effects on the different sensorial pathways.