11,588 research outputs found
Empathic Neural Responses Predict Group Allegiance.
Watching another person in pain activates brain areas involved in the sensation of our own pain. Importantly, this neural mirroring is not constant; rather, it is modulated by our beliefs about their intentions, circumstances, and group allegiances. We investigated if the neural empathic response is modulated by minimally-differentiating information (e.g., a simple text label indicating another's religious belief), and if neural activity changes predict ingroups and outgroups across independent paradigms. We found that the empathic response was larger when participants viewed a painful event occurring to a hand labeled with their own religion (ingroup) than to a hand labeled with a different religion (outgroup). Counterintuitively, the magnitude of this bias correlated positively with the magnitude of participants' self-reported empathy. A multivariate classifier, using mean activity in empathy-related brain regions as features, discriminated ingroup from outgroup with 72% accuracy; the classifier's confidence correlated with belief certainty. This classifier generalized successfully to validation experiments in which the ingroup condition was based on an arbitrary group assignment. Empathy networks thus allow for the classification of long-held, newly-modified and arbitrarily-formed ingroups and outgroups. This is the first report of a single machine learning model on neural activation that generalizes to multiple representations of ingroup and outgroup. The current findings may prove useful as an objective diagnostic tool to measure the magnitude of one's group affiliations, and the effectiveness of interventions to reduce ingroup biases
Innovations in Monitoring Vital Events: A scalable Intervention Using Mobile Phone SMS Support for Vital Registration Coverage\ud
Equilibrium mortgage choice and housing tenure decisions with refinancing
The last decade has brought about substantial mortgage innovation and increased refinancing. The objective of this paper is to understand the determinants and implications of mortgage choice in the context of a general equilibrium model with incomplete markets. The equilibrium characterization allows us to study the impact of mortgage financing decisions in the productive economy. We show the influence of different contract characteristics such as the down payment requirement, repayment structure, and the amortization schedule for mortgage choice. We find that loan products that allow for low or no down payment or an increasing repayment schedule increase the participation of young and lower-income households. We find evidence that the volume of housing transactions increases when the payment profile is increasing and households have little housing equity. In contrast, we show that loans that allow for a rapid accumulation of home equity can still have positive participation effects without increasing the volatility of the housing market. The model predicts that the expansion of mortgage contracts and refinancing improves risk sharing opportunities for homeowners, but the magnitude varies with each contract.
A multi-domain hybrid method for head-on collision of black holes in particle limit
A hybrid method is developed based on the spectral and finite-difference
methods for solving the inhomogeneous Zerilli equation in time-domain. The
developed hybrid method decomposes the domain into the spectral and
finite-difference domains. The singular source term is located in the spectral
domain while the solution in the region without the singular term is
approximated by the higher-order finite-difference method.
The spectral domain is also split into multi-domains and the
finite-difference domain is placed as the boundary domain. Due to the global
nature of the spectral method, a multi-domain method composed of the spectral
domains only does not yield the proper power-law decay unless the range of the
computational domain is large. The finite-difference domain helps reduce
boundary effects due to the truncation of the computational domain. The
multi-domain approach with the finite-difference boundary domain method reduces
the computational costs significantly and also yields the proper power-law
decay.
Stable and accurate interface conditions between the finite-difference and
spectral domains and the spectral and spectral domains are derived. For the
singular source term, we use both the Gaussian model with various values of
full width at half maximum and a localized discrete -function. The
discrete -function was generalized to adopt the Gauss-Lobatto
collocation points of the spectral domain.
The gravitational waveforms are measured. Numerical results show that the
developed hybrid method accurately yields the quasi-normal modes and the
power-law decay profile. The numerical results also show that the power-law
decay profile is less sensitive to the shape of the regularized
-function for the Gaussian model than expected. The Gaussian model also
yields better results than the localized discrete -function.Comment: 25 pages; published version (IJMPC
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