High-Resolution Effects of Modified Episodic Future Thinking: Personalized Age-Progressed Pictures Improve Risky Long-Term Health Decisions

Many of our everyday choices are associated with outcomes that are both delayed and probabilistic. The tyranny of small decisions describes a chronic pattern of present-bias decisions that result in negative outcomes in the future. The temporal attention hypothesis suggests that individuals' decision making can be improved by focusing attention to temporally distal events and reducing the desire for proximate outcomes. Viewing discounting within a temporal attention framework implies that environmental manipulations that expand the limits of an individual's temporal perspective by bringing focus on temporally distal outcomes, and thereby reducing present bias, may alter his/her degree of discounting. One such manipulation, episodic future thinking (EpFT), has shown to successfully lower discount rates. Several questions remain as to the applicability of EpFT to domains other than temporal discounting. The present experiments examine the effects of a modified EpFT procedure on probability discounting in the context of both a delayed health gain and loss. Results indicate the modified EpFT procedure effectively altered individuals' degree of discounting in the predicted directions and lend further support to the temporal attention hypothesis

The Effects of Happy Hour Drink Specials in the Alcohol Purchase Task

Operant behavioral economics is a discipline within behavioral psychology that integrates concepts and principles from microeconomic theory to examine animal (humans and non-humans alike) behavior. Research in behavioral economics – primarily demand curve analyses – has yielded valuable insights into the role of environmental effects on reinforcer consumption. Demand curve analyses examine how changes in a price of a good affect changes in consumption of that good. Due to practical and ethical concerns, preparations in demand curve analyses have shifted toward using hypothetical purchase tasks, where respondents report the quantity of a good they would be willing to purchase at various prices. There is strong evidence to suggest that happy hour drink specials are associated with undesirable outcomes such as increased amount of drinking, increased likelihood of being highly intoxicated (above the 80 mg/dl legal limit for driving under the influence), and increased likelihood of experiencing negative outcomes related to drinking (e.g., getting into fights). Public policy efforts have been made to ban or at least restrict alcohol drink specials. Drink special policies across the 50 states indicate wide variability, ranging from complete happy hour bans to no bans or restrictions. The purposes of the current experiments are to determine whether self-reported consumption of alcohol on an alcohol purchase task increases when participants imagine a hypothetical “happy hour” scenario and whether there are differences in change in consumption depending on whether participants reside in states with different happy hour restrictions (i.e., whether happy hours are banned). Results from the current experiments extend previous literature on alcohol purchase task vignette manipulations and provide some insight as to whether repealing happy hour bans in states where it is currently banned results in increased alcohol consumption

Using a Visual Analogue Scale to Assess Delay, Social, and Probability Discounting of an Environmental Loss

As anthropogenic influences on climate change become more readily apparent, the role of behavioral science in understanding barriers to sustainable actions cannot be overstated. Environmental psychologists have proposed that a major barrier to sustainability is the delayed, socially distant, and probabilistic effects of public policy efforts aimed at preserving Earth’s resources. This proposal places sustainability squarely within the research topic of delay, social, and probability discounting – processes well known to behavioral scientists. To date, there has been surprisingly little behavioral research examining the role of discounting processes in environmental decision making. In the present study, we examined the degree to which simple hyperbolic models of discounting can describe college students’ ratings of concern and their willingness to act in the face of an environmental disaster. Findings suggest that hyperbolic models of delay, social, and probability discounting adequately describe these self-report data. Interestingly, but sadly unsurprisingly, ratings of willingness to act were discounted more steeply than concern across delay, social, and probability discounting tasks. A greater understanding of the behavioral processes associated with sustainability can inform better public policy efforts and may bridge the gap between environmental psychology and behavior analysis

Making It Easier To Be Green: A Single Case Demonstration of the Effects of Computer Defaults To Conserve Energy in a University Computer Lab

This is the publisher's version, also available electronically from http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/SUS.2013.9827Educational buildings and university campuses represent some of the most computer-dense settings in the United States. Unfortunately, the administrators and users in these settings often lack proper energy saving strategies, resulting in excessive energy waste. Research in behavioral economics has reliably shown that effort is an inhibitory factor in changing a variety of behaviors. That is, humans have a tendency to choose the option that requires the least amount of effort, regardless of whether that option is the best one. Thus, it might be inferred that interventions requiring greater effort for computer users to conserve energy are unlikely to be effective. This study highlights a successful cost-cutting application of default energy savings settings in a campus computer-testing laboratory. Default settings applied by the research team did not require effort on the part of users and resulted in computers powering-down after a relatively short period of inactivity. A cost analysis revealed modest fiscal and electricity savings among the small number of computers included in the study. However, extrapolating these modest savings across the many hundreds of work stations typically found on university campuses suggests a substantial savings would result from the adoption of the intervention described herein. Implications for practice and future research are discussed

Automating Scoring of Delay Discounting for the 21- and 27-Item Monetary Choice Questionnaires

Delay discounting describes the process wherein rewards lose value as a function of their delayed receipt; how quickly rewards lose value is termed the rate of delay discounting. Rates of delay discounting are robust predictors of much behavior of societal importance. One efficient approach to obtaining a human subject’s rate of delay discounting is via the 21- and 27-item Monetary Choice Questionnaires, brief dichotomous choice tasks that assess preference between small immediate and larger delayed monetary outcomes. Unfortunately, the scoring procedures for the Monetary Choice Questionnaires are rather complex, which may serve as a barrier to their use. This report details a freely available Excel-based spreadsheet tool that automatically scores Monetary Choice Questionnaire response sets, using both traditional and contemporary/ advanced approaches. An overview of the Monetary Choice Questionnaire and its scoring algorithm is provided. We conclude with general considerations for using the spreadsheet tool

Numerical Methods for the QCD Overlap Operator IV: Hybrid Monte Carlo

The extreme computational costs of calculating the sign of the Wilson matrix within the overlap operator have so far prevented four dimensional dynamical overlap simulations on realistic lattice sizes, because the computational power required to invert the overlap operator, the time consuming part of the Hybrid Monte Carlo algorithm, is too high. In this series of papers we introduced the optimal approximation of the sign function and have been developing preconditioning and relaxation techniques which reduce the time needed for the inversion of the overlap operator by over a factor of four, bringing the simulation of dynamical overlap fermions on medium-size lattices within the range of Teraflop-computers. In this paper we adapt the HMC algorithm to overlap fermions. We approximate the matrix sign function using the Zolotarev rational approximation, treating the smallest eigenvalues of the Wilson operator exactly within the fermionic force. We then derive the fermionic force for the overlap operator, elaborating on the problem of Dirac delta-function terms from zero crossings of eigenvalues of the Wilson operator. The crossing scheme proposed shows energy violations which are better than O($\Delta\tau^2$) and thus are comparable with the violations of the standard leapfrog algorithm over the course of a trajectory. We explicitly prove that our algorithm satisfies reversibility and area conservation. Finally, we test our algorithm on small $4^4$, $6^4$, and $8^4$ lattices at large masses.Comment: v2 60 pages; substantial changes to all parts of the article; v3 minor revsion

Behavioral Economic Measurement of Cigarette Demand: A Descriptive Review of Published Approaches to the Cigarette Purchase Task

The cigarette purchase task (CPT) is a behavioral economic method for assessing demand for cigarettes. Growing interest in behavioral correlates of tobacco use in clinical and general populations as well as empirical efforts to inform policy has seen an increase in published articles employing the CPT. Accordingly, an examination of the published methods and procedures for obtaining these behavioral economic metrics is timely. The purpose of this investigation was to provide a review of published approaches to using the CPT. We searched specific Boolean operators ([“behavioral economic” AND “purchase task”] OR [“demand” AND “cigarette”]) and identified 49 empirical articles published through the year 2018 that reported administering a CPT. Articles were coded for participant characteristics (e.g., sample size, population type, age), CPT task structure (e.g., price framing, number and sequence of prices; vignettes, contextual factors), and data analytic approach (e.g., method of generating indices of cigarette demand). Results of this review indicate no standard approach to administering the CPT and underscore the need for replicability of these behavioral economic measures for the purpose of guiding clinical and policy decisions

Phenomenological Implications of Deflected Mirage Mediation: Comparison with Mirage Mediation

We compare the collider phenomenology of mirage mediation and deflected mirage mediation, which are two recently proposed "mixed" supersymmetry breaking scenarios motivated from string compactifications. The scenarios differ in that deflected mirage mediation includes contributions from gauge mediation in addition to the contributions from gravity mediation and anomaly mediation also present in mirage mediation. The threshold effects from gauge mediation can drastically alter the low energy spectrum from that of pure mirage mediation models, resulting in some cases in a squeezed gaugino spectrum and a gluino that is much lighter than other colored superpartners. We provide several benchmark deflected mirage mediation models and construct model lines as a function of the gauge mediation contributions, and discuss their discovery potential at the LHC.Comment: 29 pages, 9 figure

Multi-Messenger Gravitational Wave Searches with Pulsar Timing Arrays: Application to 3C66B Using the NANOGrav 11-year Data Set

When galaxies merge, the supermassive black holes in their centers may form binaries and, during the process of merger, emit low-frequency gravitational radiation in the process. In this paper we consider the galaxy 3C66B, which was used as the target of the first multi-messenger search for gravitational waves. Due to the observed periodicities present in the photometric and astrometric data of the source of the source, it has been theorized to contain a supermassive black hole binary. Its apparent 1.05-year orbital period would place the gravitational wave emission directly in the pulsar timing band. Since the first pulsar timing array study of 3C66B, revised models of the source have been published, and timing array sensitivities and techniques have improved dramatically. With these advances, we further constrain the chirp mass of the potential supermassive black hole binary in 3C66B to less than $(1.65\pm0.02) \times 10^9~{M_\odot}$ using data from the NANOGrav 11-year data set. This upper limit provides a factor of 1.6 improvement over previous limits, and a factor of 4.3 over the first search done. Nevertheless, the most recent orbital model for the source is still consistent with our limit from pulsar timing array data. In addition, we are able to quantify the improvement made by the inclusion of source properties gleaned from electromagnetic data to `blind' pulsar timing array searches. With these methods, it is apparent that it is not necessary to obtain exact a priori knowledge of the period of a binary to gain meaningful astrophysical inferences.Comment: 14 pages, 6 figures. Accepted by Ap

Competition for Cooperation: variability, benefits and heritability of relational wealth in hunter-gatherers

Many defining human characteristics including theory of mind, culture and language relate to our sociality, and facilitate the formation and maintenance of cooperative relationships. Therefore, deciphering the context in which our sociality evolved is invaluable in understanding what makes us unique as a species. Much work has emphasised group-level competition, such as warfare, in moulding human cooperation and sociality. However, competition and cooperation also occur within groups; and inter-individual differences in sociality have reported fitness implications in numerous non-human taxa. Here we investigate whether differential access to cooperation (relational wealth) is likely to lead to variation in fitness at the individual level among BaYaka hunter-gatherers. Using economic gift games we find that relational wealth: a) displays individual-level variation; b) provides advantages in buffering food risk, and is positively associated with body mass index (BMI) and female fertility; c) is partially heritable. These results highlight that individual-level processes may have been fundamental in the extension of human cooperation beyond small units of related individuals, and in shaping our sociality. Additionally, the findings offer insight in to trends related to human sociality found from research in other fields such as psychology and epidemiology