Changes in risk perception and self-reported protective behaviour during the first week of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States

Efforts to change behaviour are critical in minimizing the spread of highly transmissible pandemics such as COVID-19. However, it is unclear whether individuals are aware of disease risk and alter their behaviour early in the pandemic. We investigated risk perception and self-reported engagement in protective behaviours in 1591 United States-based individuals cross-sectionally and longitudinally over the first week of the pandemic. Subjects demonstrated growing awareness of risk and reported engaging in protective behaviours with increasing frequency but underestimated their risk of infection relative to the average person in the country. Social distancing and hand washing were most strongly predicted by the perceived probability of personally being infected. However, a subgroup of individuals perceived low risk and did not engage in these behaviours. Our results highlight the importance of risk perception in early interventions during large-scale pandemics

Changes in risk perception and self-reported protective behaviour during the first week of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States

Efforts to change behaviour are critical in minimizing the spread of highly transmissible pandemics such as COVID-19. However, it is unclear whether individuals are aware of disease risk and alter their behaviour early in the pandemic. We investigated risk perception and self-reported engagement in protective behaviours in 1591 United States-based individuals cross-sectionally and longitudinally over the first week of the pandemic. Subjects demonstrated growing awareness of risk and reported engaging in protective behaviours with increasing frequency but underestimated their risk of infection relative to the average person in the country. Social distancing and hand washing were most strongly predicted by the perceived probability of personally being infected. However, a subgroup of individuals perceived low risk and did not engage in these behaviours. Our results highlight the importance of risk perception in early interventions during large-scale pandemics

Ambiguity Drives Higher-Order Pavlovian Learning

In the natural world, stimulus-outcome associations are often noisy and ambiguous. Learning to disambiguate these associations to identify which specific outcomes will occur is critical for survival. Pavlovian occasion setters are stimuli that determine whether other stimuli that are ambiguous will result in a specific outcome. Occasion setting is a well-established field, but very little investigation has been conducted on how occasion setters are disambiguated when they themselves are ambiguous. We investigated the role of higher-order Pavlovian occasion setting in humans. We also developed and tested the first computational model predicting direct associations, traditional occasion setting, and 2nd-order occasion setting. Results showed that occasion setters affected ambiguous but not unambiguous lower-order stimuli and that 2nd-order occasion setting was indeed learned. Our computational model demonstrated excellent fit with the data, advancing our theoretical understanding of learning with ambiguity. These results may ultimately improve treatment of Pavlovian-based mental health disorders (e.g., anxiety)

Low-Froude-number stable flows past mountains

A new approximate analysis is presented for stably stratified flows at low Froude number F past mountains of heightH. In the “top” layer where the streamlines pass above the surface of themountain, there is a perturbation flow. This approximately matches the lower flow in the “middle” ‘horizontal’ layer [M] in which the streamlines pass round the mountain in nearly horizontal planes, as in Drazin’s (DRAZIN P. G., On the steady flow of a fluid of variable density past an obstacle, Tellus, 13 (1961) 239-251) model. The pressure associated with the diverging streamlines on the lee side of the summit layer flow drives the separated flow in the horizontal layer (which is not included in Drazin’s model). This explains the vortical wake flow in experiments and in the “inviscid” computations of Smolarkiewicz and Rotunno (SMOLARKIEWICZ P. K. and ROTUNNO R., Low Froude number flow past three-dimensional obstacles. Part I: Baroclinically generated lee vortices, J. Atmos. Sci., 46 (1989) 1154-1164). A method for estimating the height HT FH of the cut-off mountain is derived, as a function of upstream shear, mountain shape and other parameters. Recent laboratory experiments have confirmed how the curvature of the oncoming shear flow profile

Humor Modulates the Mesolimbic Reward Centers

AbstractHumor plays an essential role in many facets of human life including psychological, social, and somatic functioning. Recently, neuroimaging has been applied to this critical human attribute, shedding light on the affective, cognitive, and motor networks involved in humor processing. To date, however, researchers have failed to demonstrate the subcortical correlates of the most fundamental feature of humor—reward. In an effort to elucidate the neurobiological substrate that subserves the reward components of humor, we undertook a high-field (3 Tesla) event-related functional MRI study. Here we demonstrate that humor modulates activity in several cortical regions, and we present new evidence that humor engages a network of subcortical regions including the nucleus accumbens, a key component of the mesolimbic dopaminergic reward system. Further, the degree of humor intensity was positively correlated with BOLD signal intensity in these regions. Together, these findings offer new insight into the neural basis of salutary aspects of humor

A Key Role for Similarity in Vicarious Reward

Humans appear to have an inherent prosocial tendency toward one another in that we often take pleasure in seeing others succeed. This fact is almost certainly exploited by game shows, yet why watching others win elicits a pleasurable vicarious rewarding feeling in the absence of personal economic gain is unclear. One explanation is that game shows use contestants who have similarities to the viewing population, thereby kindling kin-motivated responses (for example, prosocial behavior). Using a game show–inspired paradigm, we show that the interactions between the ventral striatum and anterior cingulate cortex subserve the modulation of vicarious reward by similarity, respectively. Our results support studies showing that similarity acts as a proximate neurobiological mechanism where prosocial behavior extends to unrelated strangers

Law, responsibility, and the brain.

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Role of CBP and SATB-1 in Aging, Dietary Restriction, and Insulin-Like Signaling

Increased transcriptional complex activity, or pharmacological mimics of increased complex activity, predict lifespan in mice and mediate the protective effects of dietary restriction during aging