Motives and comprehension in a public goods game with induced emotions

This study analyses the sensitivity of public goods contributions through the lens of psychological motives. We report the results of a public goods experiment in which subjects were induced with the motives of care and anger through autobiographical recall. Subjects' preferences, beliefs, and perceptions under each motive are compared with those of subjects experiencing a neutral autobiographical recall control condition. We find, but only for those subjects with the highest comprehension of the game, that care elicits significantly higher contributions than anger, with the control treatment in between. This positive influence of the care motive on unconditional giving is accounted for partly by preferences for giving and partly by the beliefs concerning greater contributions by others. Anger also affects attention to own and other's payoffs (using mouse tracking) and perceptions of the game's incentive structure (cooperative or competitive)

Can Plan Recommendations Improve the Coverage Decisions of Vulnerable Populations in Health Insurance Marketplaces?

OBJECTIVE: The Affordable Care Act's marketplaces present an important opportunity for expanding coverage but consumers face enormous challenges in navigating through enrollment and re-enrollment. We tested the effectiveness of a behaviorally informed policy tool--plan recommendations--in improving marketplace decisions. STUDY SETTING: Data were gathered from a community sample of 656 lower-income, minority, rural residents of Virginia. STUDY DESIGN: We conducted an incentive-compatible, computer-based experiment using a hypothetical marketplace like the one consumers face in the federally-facilitated marketplaces, and examined their decision quality. Participants were randomly assigned to a control condition or three types of plan recommendations: social normative, physician, and government. For participants randomized to a plan recommendation condition, the plan that maximized expected earnings, and minimized total expected annual health care costs, was recommended. DATA COLLECTION: Primary data were gathered using an online choice experiment and questionnaire. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Plan recommendations resulted in a 21 percentage point increase in the probability of choosing the earnings maximizing plan, after controlling for participant characteristics. Two conditions, government or providers recommending the lowest cost plan, resulted in plan choices that lowered annual costs compared to marketplaces where no recommendations were made. CONCLUSIONS: As millions of adults grapple with choosing plans in marketplaces and whether to switch plans during open enrollment, it is time to consider marketplace redesigns and leverage insights from the behavioral sciences to facilitate consumers' decisions

Who is afraid of ticks and tick-borne diseases?:Results from a cross-sectional survey in Scandinavia

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A New Approach for Determining Phase Response Curves Reveals that Purkinje Cells Can Act as Perfect Integrators

Cerebellar Purkinje cells display complex intrinsic dynamics. They fire spontaneously, exhibit bistability, and via mutual network interactions are involved in the generation of high frequency oscillations and travelling waves of activity. To probe the dynamical properties of Purkinje cells we measured their phase response curves (PRCs). PRCs quantify the change in spike phase caused by a stimulus as a function of its temporal position within the interspike interval, and are widely used to predict neuronal responses to more complex stimulus patterns. Significant variability in the interspike interval during spontaneous firing can lead to PRCs with a low signal-to-noise ratio, requiring averaging over thousands of trials. We show using electrophysiological experiments and simulations that the PRC calculated in the traditional way by sampling the interspike interval with brief current pulses is biased. We introduce a corrected approach for calculating PRCs which eliminates this bias. Using our new approach, we show that Purkinje cell PRCs change qualitatively depending on the firing frequency of the cell. At high firing rates, Purkinje cells exhibit single-peaked, or monophasic PRCs. Surprisingly, at low firing rates, Purkinje cell PRCs are largely independent of phase, resembling PRCs of ideal non-leaky integrate-and-fire neurons. These results indicate that Purkinje cells can act as perfect integrators at low firing rates, and that the integration mode of Purkinje cells depends on their firing rate

Dendritic Slow Dynamics Enables Localized Cortical Activity to Switch between Mobile and Immobile Modes with Noisy Background Input

Mounting lines of evidence suggest the significant computational ability of a single neuron empowered by active dendritic dynamics. This motivates us to study what functionality can be acquired by a network of such neurons. The present paper studies how such rich single-neuron dendritic dynamics affects the network dynamics, a question which has scarcely been specifically studied to date. We simulate neurons with active dendrites networked locally like cortical pyramidal neurons, and find that naturally arising localized activity – called a bump – can be in two distinct modes, mobile or immobile. The mode can be switched back and forth by transient input to the cortical network. Interestingly, this functionality arises only if each neuron is equipped with the observed slow dendritic dynamics and with in vivo-like noisy background input. If the bump activity is considered to indicate a point of attention in the sensory areas or to indicate a representation of memory in the storage areas of the cortex, this would imply that the flexible mode switching would be of great potential use for the brain as an information processing device. We derive these conclusions using a natural extension of the conventional field model, which is defined by combining two distinct fields, one representing the somatic population and the other representing the dendritic population. With this tool, we analyze the spatial distribution of the degree of after-spike adaptation and explain how we can understand the presence of the two distinct modes and switching between the modes. We also discuss the possible functional impact of this mode-switching ability

A4 Flavor Models in Split Seesaw Mechanism

A seesaw mechanism in an extra-dimension, known as the split seesaw mechanism, provides a natural way to realize a splitting mass spectrum of right-handed neutrinos. It leads to one keV sterile neutrino as a dark matter candidate and two heavy right-handed neutrinos being responsible for leptogenesis to explain the observed baryon asymmetry of the Universe. We study models based on $A_4$ flavor symmetry in the context of the split seesaw mechanism. It is pointed out that most of known $A_4$ flavor models with three right-handed neutrinos being $A_4$ triplet suffer from a degeneracy problem for the bulk mass terms, which disturbs the split mechanism for right-handed neutrino mass spectrum. Then we construct a new $A_4$ flavor model to work in the split seesaw mechanism. In the model, the experimentally observed neutrino masses and mixing angles can be realized from both type I+II seesaw contributions. The model predicts the $\mu-\tau$ symmetry in the neutrino mass matrix at the leading order, resulting in the vanishing $\theta_{13}$ and maximal $\theta_{23}$. The flavor symmetry $A_4$ is broken via the flavon vacuum alignment which can be obtained from the orbifold compactification. The model can be consistent with all data of neutrino oscillation experiments, cosmological discussions of dark matter abundance, leptogenesis, and recent astrophysical data.Comment: 21 pages, 1 figure, version to appear in JHE

Natural History of Tuberculosis: Duration and Fatality of Untreated Pulmonary Tuberculosis in HIV Negative Patients: A Systematic Review

Background The prognosis, specifically the case fatality and duration, of untreated tuberculosis is important as many patients are not correctly diagnosed and therefore receive inadequate or no treatment. Furthermore, duration and case fatality of tuberculosis are key parameters in interpreting epidemiological data. Methodology and Principal Findings To estimate the duration and case fatality of untreated pulmonary tuberculosis in HIV negative patients we reviewed studies from the pre-chemotherapy era. Untreated smear-positive tuberculosis among HIV negative individuals has a 10-year case fatality variously reported between 53% and 86%, with a weighted mean of 70%. Ten-year case fatality of culture-positive smear-negative tuberculosis was nowhere reported directly but can be indirectly estimated to be approximately 20%. The duration of tuberculosis from onset to cure or death is approximately 3 years and appears to be similar for smear-positive and smear-negative tuberculosis. Conclusions Current models of untreated tuberculosis that assume a total duration of 2 years until self-cure or death underestimate the duration of disease by about one year, but their case fatality estimates of 70% for smear-positive and 20% for culture-positive smear-negative tuberculosis appear to be satisfactory

Mental Representations of Weekdays

Keeping social appointments involves keeping track of what day it is. In practice, mismatches between apparent day and actual day are common. For example, a person might think the current day is Wednesday when in fact it is Thursday. Here we show that such mismatches are highly systematic, and can be traced to specific properties of their mental representations. In Study 1, mismatches between apparent day and actual day occurred more frequently on midweek days (Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday) than on other days, and were mainly due to intrusions from immediately neighboring days. In Study 2, reaction times to report the current day were fastest on Monday and Friday, and slowest midweek. In Study 3, participants generated fewer semantic associations for "Tuesday", "Wednesday" and "Thursday" than for other weekday names. Similarly, Google searches found fewer occurrences of midweek days in webpages and books. Analysis of affective norms revealed that participants' associations were strongly negative for Monday, strongly positive for Friday, and graded over the intervening days. Midweek days are confusable because their mental representations are sparse and similar. Mondays and Fridays are less confusable because their mental representations are rich and distinctive, forming two extremes along a continuum of change

Measuring competitive self-focus perspective taking, submissive compassion and compassion goals.

Research in the last 20 years has provided good evidence that developing compassion-focused motives for self and others has a range of benefits. However, people can behave in prosocial ways for different reasons, not all of which are genuinely care focused. This paper reports research comparing submissive compassion (being helpful to be liked) to “genuine” compassion in relation to domains of empathy and perspective taking. We developed a new short (5 item) self-report scale (the competitive perspective taking scale) to explore how people might use perspective taking for self-focused reasons. We investigated its association with validated empathy and compassion measures.N/