An exploration of health-seeking behaviours among Nigerian Christians in the UK: towards enhanced health services utilisation

Migration from different cultures carries with it some acclimatisation challenges. This study explored various health-seeking behaviours and potential barriers to healthcare utilisation among Nigerian Christians in the UK. This qualitative study involved 10 adult male and female participants, with both interviews and focus group discussion (FG) for data collection (Interviews: n?=?4, FG: n?=?6). Thematic analysis revealed that religious and cultural beliefs were barriers to healthcare utilisation. The implication is that further research on cultural matching between care providers and service users is needed; where religious leaders and health providers from Nigeria can influence health decisions among this migrant community. Limitations of the current study are discussed, with directions for further research identified.     

Striatal sensitivity to personal responsibility in a regret-based decision-making task

Regret and relief are complex emotional states associated with the counterfactual processing of nonobtained outcomes in a decision-making situation. In the “actor effect,” a sense of agency and personal responsibility is thought to heighten these emotions. Using fMRI, we scanned volunteers (n = 22) as they played a task involving choices between two wheel-of-fortune gambles. We examined how neural responses to counterfactual outcomes were modulated by giving subjects the opportunity to change their minds, as a manipulation of personal responsibility. Satisfaction ratings to the outcomes were highly sensitive to the difference between the obtained and nonobtained outcome, and ratings following losses were lower on trials with the opportunity to change one’s mind. Outcome-related activity in the striatum and orbitofrontal cortex was positively related to the satisfaction ratings. The striatal response was modulated by the agency manipulation: Following losses, the striatal signal was significantly lower when the subject had the opportunity to change his/her mind. These results support the involvement of frontostriatal mechanisms in counterfactual thinking and highlight the sensitivity of the striatum to the effects of personal responsibility.     

Lessons Learned from the Intensive Mental Health Program: A School-based,Community Oriented Program for Children with Serious Emotional Disturbances

The Intensive Mental Health Program meets the needs for services in school systems for children with serious emotional disturbances and for training graduate students in clinical applications with a difficult-to-serve population. We address the range of challenges and rewards experienced in the development of the comprehensive intervention program, the continued maintenance of program elements, and the program evaluation.     

The smell of cooperativeness: Do human body odours advertise cooperative behaviours?

Several physical features influence the perception of how cooperative a potential partner is. While previous work focused on face and voice, it remains unknown whether body odours influence judgements of cooperativeness and if odour-based judgements are accurate. Here, we first collected axillary odours of cooperative and uncooperative male donors through a public good game and used them as olfactory stimuli in a series of tasks examining whether and how they influence cooperative decision-making in an incentivized economic game and ratings of cooperativeness. Our results show that having access to the donor's body odours provided a strategic advantage to women during economic decisions (but not to men): with age, women were more likely to cooperate with cooperative men and to avoid interacting with uncooperative men. Ratings of cooperativeness were nonetheless unrelated to the donors’ actual cooperativeness. Finally, while men with masculine and intense body odours were judged less cooperative, we found no evidence that donors’ actual cooperativeness was associated with less masculine or less intense body odour. Overall, our findings suggest that, as faces and voices, body odours influence perceived cooperativeness and might be used accurately and in a non-aware manner as olfactory cues of cooperativeness, at least by women.     

No pain, no gain: the conditions under which upward comparisons lead to better performance

In 3 studies, the authors explored the relation between threatening upward social comparisons and performance. In an initial study, participants were exposed to comparison targets who either threatened or boosted self-evaluations and then completed a performance task. Participants exposed to the threatening target performed better than those in a control group, whereas those exposed to the nonthreatening target performed worse. In Study 2, self-affirmation prior to comparison with threatening targets eliminated performance improvements. In Study 3, performance improvements were found only when the performance domain was different from the domain of success of the comparison target. These boundary conditions suggest that increases in performance following social comparison arise from individuals' motivations to maintain and repair self-evaluations. Implications for the study of the behavioral consequences of social comparison are discussed.     

Quantity-based judgments in the domestic dog (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Canis lupus familiaris</Emphasis>)

We examined the ability of domestic dogs to choose the larger versus smaller quantity of food in two experiments. In experiment 1, we investigated the ability of 29 dogs (results from 18 dogs were used in the data analysis) to discriminate between two quantities of food presented in eight different combinations. Choices were simultaneously presented and visually available at the time of choice. Overall, subjects chose the larger quantity more often than the smaller quantity, but they found numerically close comparisons more difficult. In experiment 2, we tested two dogs from experiment 1 under three conditions. In condition 1, we used similar methods from experiment 1 and tested the dogs multiple times on the eight combinations from experiment 1 plus one additional combination. In conditions 2 and 3, the food was visually unavailable to the subjects at the time of choice, but in condition 2, food choices were viewed simultaneously before being made visually unavailable, and in condition 3, they were viewed successively. In these last two conditions, and especially in condition 3, the dogs had to keep track of quantities mentally in order to choose optimally. Subjects still chose the larger quantity more often than the smaller quantity when the food was not simultaneously visible at the time of choice. Olfactory cues and inadvertent cuing by the experimenter were excluded as mechanisms for choosing larger quantities. The results suggest that, like apes tested on similar tasks, some dogs can form internal representations and make mental comparisons of quantity.     

Retracted:When different is better: performance following upward comparison

The attainability of upward social comparisons is known to affect self‐evaluative responses. The consequences for performance, however, are less well understood. We suggest that demoralizing upward comparisons with unattainable targets may lead to improved performance when the target and performance domains are mismatched. For example, comparison with a target that has been successful in an analytic domain should lead to better performance in a verbal domain. This improvement in performance occurs because increased performance in alternative domains provides an opportunity for self‐evaluation maintenance. In three studies, we demonstrate that upward comparisons to targets whose successes are perceived as threatening lead to improved performance when the task and performance domain do not match, but no improvements when the domains match. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Attributions of causality and reactions to uncontrollable outcomes

The experiment tested the hypothesis that the stress experienced by a person who is unable to control aversive stimulation is not a function of lack of control per se, but of the attribution of causality that (s)he makes for failure to exert control. Subjects were given a problem-solving task, and were told that they could prevent aversive noise bursts by correctly solving the problems. Subjects then received false feedback that they had done either well or poorly on the problems. In addition, failing subjects received information that led them to attribute their performance either to their own lack of ability or to situational factors (task difficulty). Subjects who attributed their failure to their own incompetence felt considerably more stress than subjects who made situational attributions. In fact, the latter subjects experienced no more stress than subjects who were successful in controlling the stimulation. Surprisingly, subjects whose attributions for performance led them to feel personally incompetent performed better than the remaining subjects both on problems administered in the same situation, and on problems administered in a new and different situation. The implications of the results for future helplessness studies and for the learned helplessness model were discussed.