100 research outputs found

    For Love or Money: A Common Neural Currency forĀ Social and Monetary Reward

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    Two papers in the current issue of Neuron (Izuma etĀ al. and Zink etĀ al.) report that activity in specific regions of the brain, especially the striatum, reflects a common signal of reward in both the economic (e.g., money) and social (e.g., praise and status) domains

    Community-based Crisis Response: Evidence from Sierra Leoneā€™s Ebola Outbreak

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    Postmortems on the recent Ebola outbreak in West Africa suggest that effective community engagement helped slow transmission by encouraging people to come forward and be tested. We evaluate the impact of Community Care Centers: a new crisis response model designed to allay fears about western medical care and, thus, encourage early reporting, isolation, and treatment. We employ new panel data on reported Ebola cases and a difference-in-difference design and find that Community Care Centers dramatically increased reporting, potentially reducing the spread of Ebola. Our results highlight how community-based efforts to increase confidence in health systems can be critical for crisis management

    Multivariate Patterns in Object-Selective Cortex Dissociate Perceptual and Physical Shape Similarity

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    Prior research has identified the lateral occipital complex (LOC) as a critical cortical region for the representation of object shape in humans. However, little is known about the nature of the representations contained in the LOC and their relationship to the perceptual experience of shape. We used human functional MRI to measure the physical, behavioral, and neural similarity between pairs of novel shapes to ask whether the representations of shape contained in subregions of the LOC more closely reflect the physical stimuli themselves, or the perceptual experience of those stimuli. Perceptual similarity measures for each pair of shapes were obtained from a psychophysical same-different task; physical similarity measures were based on stimulus parameters; and neural similarity measures were obtained from multivoxel pattern analysis methods applied to anterior LOC (pFs) and posterior LOC (LO). We found that the pattern of pairwise shape similarities in LO most closely matched physical shape similarities, whereas shape similarities in pFs most closely matched perceptual shape similarities. Further, shape representations were similar across participants in LO but highly variable across participants in pFs. Together, these findings indicate that activation patterns in subregions of object-selective cortex encode objects according to a hierarchy, with stimulus-based representations in posterior regions and subjective and observer-specific representations in anterior regions

    Using behavioral science to promote international development

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    https://issuu.com/behavioralsciencepolicyassociation/docs/v3i3_web_bryanhttps://issuu.com/behavioralsciencepolicyassociation/docs/v3i3_web_bryanhttps://issuu.com/behavioralsciencepolicyassociation/docs/v3i3_web_bryanhttps://issuu.com/behavioralsciencepolicyassociation/docs/v3i3_web_bryanhttps://issuu.com/behavioralsciencepolicyassociation/docs/v3i3_web_bryanhttps://issuu.com/behavioralsciencepolicyassociation/docs/v3i3_web_bryanAccepted manuscrip

    The effects of mental health interventions on labour market outcomes in low-and-middle-income countries

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    Mental health conditions are prevalent but rarely treated in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Little is known about how these conditions affect economic participation. This paper shows that treating mental health conditions substantially improves recipientsā€™ capacity to work in these contexts. First, we perform a systematic review and meta-analysis of all randomized controlled trials (RCTs) ever conducted that evaluate treatments for mental ill-health and measure economic outcomes in LMICs. On average, treating common mental disorders like depression with psychotherapy improves an aggregate of labor market outcomes made up of employment, time spent working, capacity to work and job search by 0.16 standard deviations. Treating severe mental disorders, like schizophrenia, improves the aggregate by 0.30 standard deviations, but effects are noisily estimated. Second, we build a new dataset, pooling all available microdata from RCTs using the most common trial design: studies of psychotherapy in LMICs that treated depression and measured days participants were unable to work in the past month. We observe comparable treatment effects on mental health and work outcomes in this sub-sample of highly similar studies. We also show evidence consistent with mental health being the mechanism through which psychotherapy improves work outcomes
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