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Arterial baroreceptors are located in the carotid and aortic arteries and play a pivotal role in rapid control of cardiovascular system. The purpose of this article is to review the effects of baroreceptors stimulation on heart rate at rest and during exercise and cerebral blood flow rate in young and middle aged male and female individuals. There is ample evidence indicating that the arterial baroreflex remains functional during exercise by readjustment which is in direct relation to the intensity of exercise. These adjustments might be done through somatosensory afferents from peripheral regions of the body, pathways obeying central command neurons, or vasopressin and oxytocin pathways that converge into the nucleus tractus solitarii (NTS). Cerebral blood flow autoregulation is a process by which cerebral blood flow is maintained at a fixed rate despite fluctuations in cerebral perfusion pressure. Similar to that in young individuals, this mechanism, despite fluctuations in baroreceptors sensitivity, stabilizes cerebral blood flow rate in a certain range in middle-aged individuals, although with aging the absolute cerebral blood flow rate decreases in both genders. In addition, it has also been shown that after termination of carotid baroreceptors stimulation, heart rate increases which is known as postvagal tachycardia (PVT). It seems that two components, adrenergic and non-adrenergic, are involved in PVT.

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Background: Human brain consists of two hemispheres with contralateral control of the body. One hemisphere's function is predominate to another, so one side of the body is more powerful in performing special tasks comparing the other which this property is almost used to determine predominant hemisphere of the brain. This analytic study performed to assess the effect of handedness and gender on the result of school readiness assessment examination in children.

Materials and Methods: Of 6 to 6.5 years old children living in middle socioeconomic regions of Qazvin city, referred to preschool Examining center to assess educational readiness and other physical examination, 400 children equally of both sexes were randomly selected in two Left-Handed (LH) and Right-Handed (RH) groups to compare the results of school readiness assessment examination. The data was statistically analysed and P-Value less than 0.05 was considered significant.

Results: The results of School Readiness Assessment Examination in LH and RH children were 38.71±2.70 and 38.15±4.04, respectively without significant difference. These results were 38.8±3.8 and 38.30±3.4 in boys and girls respectively, without significant difference. Comparing RH and LH cases in each sex group did not show any significance.

Conclusion: No significance was observed comparing the results of School Readiness Assessment Examination in LH and RH groups and between two gender groups.

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Background: Individual differences, especially gender, have an important role on individuals responds to the emotions. In cognitive science investigations, the analysis of biological signals has been introduced as a confident way to evaluate such responses. In this paper, by adopting a comprehensive approach on biomedical signal processing techniques, a precise examination on women and men differences in affective responses has been provided into different emotional stimuli, including fear, sadness, happiness, and peacefulness.

Materials and Methods: Accordingly, signal processing methods were divided into three general categories, linear, wavelet, and non-linear based techniques. In the proposed method, different features from each of three categories and from three autonomic signals, including electrocardiogram (ECG), finger pulse, and galvanic skin response (GSR), were extracted. To induce emotions in participants, validated emotional pieces of music were broadcast in four affective classes.

Results: The results indicate the different patterns of responses into affective incentives in women and men. The differences were more noticeable in the features of pulse signal than those of the other signals. Among emotional classes, fear resulted in the highest rate of distinction between men and women emotional responses.

Conclusion: By the comprehensive evaluation of autonomic signals and different signal processing techniques, this study has tried to offer a new insight for better understanding of gender differences in emotional responses. In addition, it will help the researchers to adopt appropriate decisions in identifying efficient processing approach to deal with large amount of information achieved from signal analysis.