Gratitude and prosociality: a behavioural economics and psychometric perspective

We feel gratitude—a positive emotion upon receiving an undeserved benefit which is attributable to the givers’ benevolent intent (Watkins, 2007, 2014). Meanwhile, indebtedness symbolises an unpleasant mental state which is also triggered by benefit receipts (Greenberg, 1980). Theories and empirical evidence in the literature have highlighted how gratitude and indebtedness each relates to prosociality (or sanctioning), and importantly, how via different routes these two constructs will elicit cooperativeness. Nonetheless, there is still a gap in the literature on how gratitude and indebtedness will contribute to prosociality and sanctioning in economic exchanges (Leung, 2011). Thus via three economic games (i.e. Experiments 1 to 3, presented in Chapters 2 to 5) I endeavour to thoroughly examine how gratitude (and indebtedness) would relate to prosociality or sanctioning in a Behavioural Economics context. In so doing I intend to combine Psychometrics and Experimental Economics in the examination of the gratitude (and indebtedness)-prosociality association. Additionally, via meta-analysing (i.e. Chapter 2) over three decades of research on the gratitude-prosociality link I intend to offer i) a comprehensive quantitative synthesis of the findings and, ii) a systematic exploration of moderators, which are both absent in the literature. The present thesis also features a series of extensive follow-up analyses on an interesting economic observation from Experiment 1— i.e. the cheap-rider problem (Cornes & Sandler, 1984). While Experiment 2 entails a more focused scrutiny (via a one-shot game) over the occurrences and motives behind cheap-riding, Experiment 3 builds on that by testing how cheap-riding may be used to enforce normative fairness in an iterated exchange context. Results of the meta-analysis revealed a moderate positive link between gratitude and prosociality. The moderator analyses showed that this link is stronger when, a) state rather than trait gratitude was measured, b) direct instead of indirect or non-reciprocal outcomes was examined, and c) benefit-triggered instead of generalized gratitude (Lambert et al., 2009) was examined. Meanwhile, results of Experiment 1 built upon the above by showing how the gratitude-reciprocity link will be subject to helper intent attribution, and how the injunctive fairness norm (Elster, 2006) could influence this attribution and thereby shaped recipients’ feeling of gratitude (or indebtedness) throughout the episode, and ultimately his/her urge to directly reciprocate. Additionally, a noticeable degree of cheap-riding was observed when unfairly treated participants were granted an avenue to sanction their helpers. The data of Experiment 2 revealed a pattern of cheap-riding that corresponded not only to that of Experiment 1 but also to the reality. Crucially, the analyses of the motives behind repayment allowed the disentanglement of the psychology between that of the cheap-riders, cooperators, and free-riders. Lastly, analyses of Experiment 3 revealed three main findings. They included, a) people’s preference for an ‘optimal’ platform for cheap-riding to better serve its norm-enforcing function, although its actual efficacy in promoting mutual compliance to normative fairness is still questionable; b) how the Relative Rank Model of Gratitude (Wood, Brown, & Maltby, 2011) will supersede the injunctive fairness norm in guiding the recipients’ benefit appraisals, experienced gratitude, and eventual direct reciprocal acts toward the helpers; and c) how gratitude and indebtedness were both predictive of more trustworthiness and generosity in an iterated, variant of Trust Game

Gratitude and prosociality: a behavioural economics and psychometric perspective

We feel gratitude—a positive emotion upon receiving an undeserved benefit which is attributable to the givers’ benevolent intent (Watkins, 2007, 2014). Meanwhile, indebtedness symbolises an unpleasant mental state which is also triggered by benefit receipts (Greenberg, 1980). Theories and empirical evidence in the literature have highlighted how gratitude and indebtedness each relates to prosociality (or sanctioning), and importantly, how via different routes these two constructs will elicit cooperativeness. Nonetheless, there is still a gap in the literature on how gratitude and indebtedness will contribute to prosociality and sanctioning in economic exchanges (Leung, 2011). Thus via three economic games (i.e. Experiments 1 to 3, presented in Chapters 2 to 5) I endeavour to thoroughly examine how gratitude (and indebtedness) would relate to prosociality or sanctioning in a Behavioural Economics context. In so doing I intend to combine Psychometrics and Experimental Economics in the examination of the gratitude (and indebtedness)-prosociality association. Additionally, via meta-analysing (i.e. Chapter 2) over three decades of research on the gratitude-prosociality link I intend to offer i) a comprehensive quantitative synthesis of the findings and, ii) a systematic exploration of moderators, which are both absent in the literature. The present thesis also features a series of extensive follow-up analyses on an interesting economic observation from Experiment 1— i.e. the cheap-rider problem (Cornes & Sandler, 1984). While Experiment 2 entails a more focused scrutiny (via a one-shot game) over the occurrences and motives behind cheap-riding, Experiment 3 builds on that by testing how cheap-riding may be used to enforce normative fairness in an iterated exchange context. Results of the meta-analysis revealed a moderate positive link between gratitude and prosociality. The moderator analyses showed that this link is stronger when, a) state rather than trait gratitude was measured, b) direct instead of indirect or non-reciprocal outcomes was examined, and c) benefit-triggered instead of generalized gratitude (Lambert et al., 2009) was examined. Meanwhile, results of Experiment 1 built upon the above by showing how the gratitude-reciprocity link will be subject to helper intent attribution, and how the injunctive fairness norm (Elster, 2006) could influence this attribution and thereby shaped recipients’ feeling of gratitude (or indebtedness) throughout the episode, and ultimately his/her urge to directly reciprocate. Additionally, a noticeable degree of cheap-riding was observed when unfairly treated participants were granted an avenue to sanction their helpers. The data of Experiment 2 revealed a pattern of cheap-riding that corresponded not only to that of Experiment 1 but also to the reality. Crucially, the analyses of the motives behind repayment allowed the disentanglement of the psychology between that of the cheap-riders, cooperators, and free-riders. Lastly, analyses of Experiment 3 revealed three main findings. They included, a) people’s preference for an ‘optimal’ platform for cheap-riding to better serve its norm-enforcing function, although its actual efficacy in promoting mutual compliance to normative fairness is still questionable; b) how the Relative Rank Model of Gratitude (Wood, Brown, & Maltby, 2011) will supersede the injunctive fairness norm in guiding the recipients’ benefit appraisals, experienced gratitude, and eventual direct reciprocal acts toward the helpers; and c) how gratitude and indebtedness were both predictive of more trustworthiness and generosity in an iterated, variant of Trust Game

Revealing the Hidden Details of Nanostructure in a Pharmaceutical Cream

Creams are multi-component semi-solid emulsions that find widespread utility across a wide range of pharmaceutical, cosmetic, and personal care products, and they also feature prominently in veterinary preparations and processed foodstuffs. The internal architectures of these systems, however, have to date been inferred largely through macroscopic and/or indirect experimental observations and so they are not well-characterized at the molecular level. Moreover, while their long-term stability and shelf-life, and their aesthetics and functional utility are critically dependent upon their molecular structure, there is no real understanding yet of the structural mechanisms that underlie the potential destabilizing effects of additives like drugs, anti-oxidants or preservatives, and no structure-based rationale to guide product formulation. In the research reported here we sought to address these deficiencies, making particular use of small-angle neutron scattering and exploiting the device of H/D contrast variation, with complementary studies also performed using bright-field and polarised light microscopy, small-angle and wide-angle X-ray scattering, and steady-state shear rheology measurements. Through the convolved findings from these studies we have secured a finely detailed picture of the molecular structure of creams based on Aqueous Cream BP, and our findings reveal that the structure is quite different from the generic picture of cream structure that is widely accepted and reproduced in textbooks

Bayesian Centroid Estimation for Motif Discovery

Biological sequences may contain patterns that are signal important biomolecular functions; a classical example is regulation of gene expression by transcription factors that bind to specific patterns in genomic promoter regions. In motif discovery we are given a set of sequences that share a common motif and aim to identify not only the motif composition, but also the binding sites in each sequence of the set. We present a Bayesian model that is an extended version of the model adopted by the Gibbs motif sampler, and propose a new centroid estimator that arises from a refined and meaningful loss function for binding site inference. We discuss the main advantages of centroid estimation for motif discovery, including computational convenience, and how its principled derivation offers further insights about the posterior distribution of binding site configurations. We also illustrate, using simulated and real datasets, that the centroid estimator can differ from the maximum a posteriori estimator.Comment: 24 pages, 9 figure

Sampling Scarab Beetles in Tropical Forests: The Effect of Light Source and Night Sampling Periods

Light traps have been used widely to sample insect abundance and diversity, but their performance for sampling scarab beetles in tropical forests based on light source type and sampling hours throughout the night has not been evaluated. The efficiency of mercury-vapour lamps, cool white light and ultraviolet light sources in attracting Dynastinae, Melolonthinae and Rutelinae scarab beetles, and the most adequate period of the night to carry out the sampling was tested in different forest areas of Costa Rica. Our results showed that light source wavelengths and hours of sampling influenced scarab beetle catches. No significant differences were observed in trap performance between the ultraviolet light and mercury-vapour traps, whereas these two methods caught significantly more species richness and abundance than cool white light traps. Species composition also varied between methods. Large differences appear between catches in the sampling period, with the first five hours of the night being more effective than the last five hours. Because of their high efficiency and logistic advantages, we recommend ultraviolet light traps deployed during the first hours of the night as the best sampling method for biodiversity studies of those scarab beetles in tropical forests

Improving the Public’s Health Through Sustained, Multidisciplinary Academic and Community Partnerships: The MSM Model

Background: To meet the growing needs of communities with increased chronic conditions, decreased access to health services, and a changing sociocultural environment, there is a critical need for community-oriented physicians equipped with the skills to attend to the health of underserved populations. The Morehouse School of Medicine Community Health Course’s (CHC) purpose is to inculcate service-learning and public health techniques to equip community-oriented physicians with empathy and tools to effectively engage diverse communities and provide care that addresses the social determinants of health to achieve health equity. The purpose of this practice note is to discuss CHC multidisciplinary strategies used to sustain community partner relationships and impact public health. Methods: We work to effectively engage community partners in a number of ways including: a core approach that the partnership is designed to assess, listen to, and meet the communities’ needs; that community partners inform the course curriculum through a community advisory board, an introductory course community panel (of advice for effective engagement), and attendance at course meetings and retreats; a continued relationship between the course faculty and the community site over time; community representatives as co-authors on presentations and publications; and, at times, maintained student contact with the community sites for volunteer activities after completion of the course. Results: The Community Health Course collaborates with its community partners to educate medical students, provide requested services to the communities, and impact the health needs of the communities. The course has developed long-term partnerships varying in lengths from 1 year to over 15 years. The partner organizations over the last ten years have included pre-K-12 schools, independent senior living facilities, youth organizations, community-based organizations, and homeless shelters. Conclusions: Through long-standing collaborations with partnering organizations, the CHC has participated in the development of several sustainable projects traversing multiple levels of the social ecological model

Chromatin establishes an immature version of neuronal protocadherin selection during the naive-to-primed conversion of pluripotent stem cells.

In the mammalian genome, the clustered protocadherin (cPCDH) locus provides a paradigm for stochastic gene expression with the potential to generate a unique cPCDH combination in every neuron. Here we report a chromatin-based mechanism that emerges during the transition from the naive to the primed states of cell pluripotency and reduces, by orders of magnitude, the combinatorial potential in the human cPCDH locus. This mechanism selectively increases the frequency of stochastic selection of a small subset of cPCDH genes after neuronal differentiation in monolayers, 10-month-old cortical organoids and engrafted cells in the spinal cords of rats. Signs of these frequent selections can be observed in the brain throughout fetal development and disappear after birth, except in conditions of delayed maturation such as Down's syndrome. We therefore propose that a pattern of limited cPCDH-gene expression diversity is maintained while human neurons still retain fetal-like levels of maturation

Supersymmetric QCD: Exact Results and Strong Coupling

We revisit two longstanding puzzles in supersymmetric gauge theories. The first concerns the question of the holomorphy of the coupling, and related to this the possible definition of an exact (NSVZ) beta function. The second concerns instantons in pure gluodynamics, which appear to give sensible, exact results for certain correlation functions, which nonetheless differ from those obtained using systematic weak coupling expansions. For the first question, we extend an earlier proposal of Arkani-Hamed and Murayama, showing that if their regulated action is written suitably, the holomorphy of the couplings is manifest, and it is easy to determine the renormalization scheme for which the NSVZ formula holds. This scheme, however, is seen to be one of an infinite class of schemes, each leading to an exact beta function; the NSVZ scheme, while simple, is not selected by any compelling physical consideration. For the second question, we explain why the instanton computation in the pure supersymmetric gauge theory is not reliable, even at short distances. The semiclassical expansion about the instanton is purely formal; if infrared divergences appear, they spoil arguments based on holomorphy. We demonstrate that infrared divergences do not occur in the perturbation expansion about the instanton, but explain that there is no reason to think this captures all contributions from the sector with unit topological charge. That one expects additional contributions is illustrated by dilute gas corrections. These are infrared divergent, and so difficult to define, but if non-zero give order one, holomorphic, corrections to the leading result. Exploiting an earlier analysis of Davies et al, we demonstrate that in the theory compactified on a circle of radius beta, due to infrared effects, finite contributions indeed arise which are not visible in the formal limit that beta goes to infinity.Comment: 28 pages, two references added, one typo correcte

U(2) and Maximal Mixing of nu_{mu}

A U(2) flavor symmetry can successfully describe the charged fermion masses and mixings, and supress SUSY FCNC processes, making it a viable candidate for a theory of flavor. We show that a direct application of this U(2) flavor symmetry automatically predicts a mixing of 45 degrees for nu_mu to nu_s, where nu_s is a light, right-handed state. The introduction of an additional flavor symmetry acting on the right-handed neutrinos makes the model phenomenologically viable, explaining the solar neutrino deficit as well as the atmospheric neutrino anomaly, while giving a potential hot dark matter candidate and retaining the theory's predictivity in the quark sector.Comment: 20 pages, 1 figur