Mental budgeting and the malleability of decision-making

Financial difficulties commonly occur in college students' lives. Problems might be caused by a lack of understanding about managing money, such as falling into the temptation of buying unnecessary discounted goods or choice justification. The research aims to understand how mental budgeting influences purchasing discounted items and choice justification. In the study, two experiments were undertaken to explain the reaction of discount, and two others to describe choice justification (N=169 in Indonesia, N=168 in China). Mann-Whitney U and ANOVA tests were used to analyze the experiments. Mental budgeting scales were also employed in experiments 3 and 4. The results show that when individuals receive a discounted offer for luxury goods, they will fall into the temptation of buying them. This takes place because they do not want to lose the opportunity to obtain such goods at a cheap price. In addition, when individuals receive offers related to physiological needs (i.e., food), they will practice choice justification. This means that all people need to understand the concept of mental budgeting and make realistic budgets

Human preferences for sexually dimorphic faces may be evolutionarily novel

This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.A large literature proposes that preferences for exaggerated sex typicality in human faces (masculinity/femininity) reflect a long evolutionary history of sexual and social selection. This proposal implies that dimorphism was important to judgments of attractiveness and personality in ancestral environments. It is difficult to evaluate, however, because most available data come from largescale, industrialized, urban populations. Here, we report the results for 12 populations with very diverse levels of economic development. Surprisingly, preferences for exaggerated sex-specific traits are only found in the novel, highly developed environments. Similarly, perceptions that masculine males look aggressive increase strongly with development, specifically, urbanization. These data challenge the hypothesis that facial dimorphism was an important ancestral signal of heritable mate value. One possibility is that highly developed environments provide novel opportunities to discern relationships between facial traits and behavior by exposing individuals to large numbers of unfamiliar faces, revealing patterns too subtle to detect with smaller samples

The Effect of Resistance Training in Healthy Adults on Body Fat Percentage, Fat Mass and Visceral Fat: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Background: Resistance training is the gold standard exercise mode for accrual of lean muscle mass, but the isolated effect of resistance training on body fat is unknown. Objectives: This systematic review and meta-analysis evaluated resistance training for body composition outcomes in healthy adults. Our primary outcome was body fat percentage; secondary outcomes were body fat mass and visceral fat. Design: Systematic review with meta-analysis. Data Sources: We searched five electronic databases up to January 2021. Eligibility Criteria: We included randomised trials that compared full-body resistance training for at least 4 weeks to no-exercise control in healthy adults. Analysis: We assessed study quality with the TESTEX tool and conducted a random-effects meta-analysis, with a subgroup analysis based on measurement type (scan or non-scan) and sex (male or female), and a meta-regression for volume of resistance training and training components. Results: From 11,981 records, we included 58 studies in the review, with 54 providing data for a meta-analysis. Mean study quality was 9/15 (range 6–15). Compared to the control, resistance training reduced body fat percentage by − 1.46% (95% confidence interval − 1.78 to − 1.14, p < 0.0001), body fat mass by − 0.55 kg (95% confidence interval − 0.75 to − 0.34, p < 0.0001) and visceral fat by a standardised mean difference of − 0.49 (95% confidence interval − 0.87 to − 0.11, p = 0.0114). Measurement type was a significant moderator in body fat percentage and body fat mass, but sex was not. Training volume and training components were not associated with effect size. Summary/Conclusions: Resistance training reduces body fat percentage, body fat mass and visceral fat in healthy adults. Study Registration: osf.io/hsk32

Cerebral blood flow predicts differential neurotransmitter activity

Application of metabolic magnetic resonance imaging measures such as cerebral blood flow in translational medicine is limited by the unknown link of observed alterations to specific neurophysiological processes. In particular, the sensitivity of cerebral blood flow to activity changes in specific neurotransmitter systems remains unclear. We address this question by probing cerebral blood flow in healthy volunteers using seven established drugs with known dopaminergic, serotonergic, glutamatergic and GABAergic mechanisms of action. We use a novel framework aimed at disentangling the observed effects to contribution from underlying neurotransmitter systems. We find for all evaluated compounds a reliable spatial link of respective cerebral blood flow changes with underlying neurotransmitter receptor densities corresponding to their primary mechanisms of action. The strength of these associations with receptor density is mediated by respective drug affinities. These findings suggest that cerebral blood flow is a sensitive brain-wide in-vivo assay of metabolic demands across a variety of neurotransmitter systems in humans

A measure of individual role in collective dynamics

Identifying key players in collective dynamics remains a challenge in several research fields, from the efficient dissemination of ideas to drug target discovery in biomedical problems. The difficulty lies at several levels: how to single out the role of individual elements in such intermingled systems, or which is the best way to quantify their importance. Centrality measures describe a node's importance by its position in a network. The key issue obviated is that the contribution of a node to the collective behavior is not uniquely determined by the structure of the system but it is a result of the interplay between dynamics and network structure. We show that dynamical influence measures explicitly how strongly a node's dynamical state affects collective behavior. For critical spreading, dynamical influence targets nodes according to their spreading capabilities. For diffusive processes it quantifies how efficiently real systems may be controlled by manipulating a single node.Comment: accepted for publication in Scientific Report

The notch regulator MAML1 interacts with p53 and functions as a coactivator.

Members of the evolutionarily conserved Mastermind (MAM) protein family, including the three related mammalian Mastermind-like (MAML) proteins MAML1-3, function as crucial coactivators of Notch-mediated transcriptional activation. Given the recent evidence of cross-talk between the p53 and Notch signal transduction pathways, we have investigated whether MAML1 may also be a transcriptional coactivator of p53. Indeed, we show here that MAML1 is able to interact with p53. We show that MAML1-p53 interaction involves the N-terminal region of MAML1 and the DNA-binding domain of p53, and we use a chromatin immunoprecipitation assay to show that MAML1 is part of the activator complex that binds to native p53-response elements within the promoter of the p53 target genes. Overexpression of wild-type MAML1 as well as a mutant, defective in Notch signaling, enhanced the p53-dependent gene induction in mammalian cells, whereas MAML1 knockdown reduced the p53-dependent gene expression. MAML1 increases the half-life of p53 protein and enhances its phosphorylation/acetylation upon DNA damage of cells. Finally, RNA interference-mediated knockdown of the single Caenorhabditis elegans MAML homolog, Lag-3, led to substantial abrogation of p53-mediated germ-cell apoptotic response to DNA damage and markedly reduced the expression of Ced-13 and Egl-1, downstream pro-apoptotic targets of the C. elegans p53 homolog Cep-1. Thus, we present evidence for a novel coactivator function of MAML1 for p53, independent of its function as a coactivator of Notch signaling pathway

Transplantation tolerance: lessons from experimental rodent models

Immunological tolerance or functional unresponsiveness to a transplant is arguably the only approach that is likely to provide long-term graft survival without the problems associated with life-long global immunosuppression. Over the past 50 years, rodent models have become an invaluable tool for elucidating the mechanisms of tolerance to alloantigens. Importantly, rodent models can be adapted to ensure that they reflect more accurately the immune status of human transplant recipients. More recently, the development of genetically modified mice has enabled specific insights into the cellular and molecular mechanisms that play a key role in both the induction and maintenance of tolerance to be obtained and more complex questions to be addressed. This review highlights strategies designed to induce alloantigen specific immunological unresponsiveness leading to transplantation tolerance that have been developed through the use of experimental models