Social discounting of pain

Impatience can be formalized as a delay discount rate, describing how the subjective value of reward decreases as it is delayed. By analogy, selfishness can be formalized as a social discount rate, representing how the subjective value of rewarding another person decreases with increasing social distance. Delay and social discount rates for reward are correlated across individuals. However no previous work has examined whether this relationship also holds for aversive outcomes. Neither has previous work described a functional form for social discounting of pain in humans. This is a pertinent question, since preferences over aversive outcomes formally diverge from those for reward. We addressed this issue in an experiment in which healthy adult participants (N = 67) chose the timing and intensity of hypothetical pain for themselves and others. In keeping with previous studies, participants showed a strong preference for immediate over delayed pain. Participants showed greater concern for pain in close others than for their own pain, though this hyperaltruism was steeply discounted with increasing social distance. Impatience for pain and social discounting of pain were weakly correlated across individuals. Our results extend a link between impatience and selfishness to the aversive domain.     

Czech version of Spiritual Health Questionnaire development: a research note

ABSTRACT

The Czech Republic is one of the most secularised societies, while atheistic and spiritual values are increasingly acknowledged and practiced. This research note has two objectives. First, we provide cultural and societal background of a development of the Spiritual Health Questionnaire. Second, the paper discusses empirical approach to the development of a battery of scales designed to systematically assess spiritual health for future spirituality research aimed at the Czech population and beyond.     

Serotonin enhances the impact of health information on food choice

Serotonin has been implicated in promoting self-control, regulation of hunger and physiological homeostasis, and regulation of caloric intake. However, it remains unclear whether the effects of serotonin on caloric intake reflect purely homeostatic mechanisms, or whether serotonin also modulates cognitive processes involved in dietary decision making. We investigated the effects of an acute dose of the serotonin reuptake inhibitor citalopram on choices between food items that differed along taste and health attributes, compared with placebo and the noradrenaline reuptake inhibitor atomoxetine. Twenty-seven participants attended three sessions and received single doses of atomoxetine, citalopram, and placebo in a double-blind randomised cross-over design. Relative to placebo, citalopram increased choices of more healthy foods over less healthy foods. Citalopram also increased the emphasis on health considerations in decisions. Atomoxetine did not affect decision making relative to placebo. The results support the hypothesis that serotonin may influence food choice by enhancing a focus on long-term goals. The findings are relevant for understanding decisions about food consumption and also for treating health conditions such as eating disorders and obesity.     

The Price of Pain and the Value of Suffering

ABSTRACT— Estimating the financial value of pain informs issues as diverse as the market price of analgesics, the cost-effectiveness of clinical treatments, compensation for injury, and the response to public hazards. Such valuations are assumed to reflect a stable trade-off between relief of discomfort and money. Here, using an auction-based health-market experiment, we show that the price people pay for relief of pain is strongly determined by the local context of the market, that is, by recent intensities of pain or immediately disposable income (but not overall wealth). The absence of a stable valuation metric suggests that the dynamic behavior of health markets is not predictable from the static behavior of individuals. We conclude that the results follow the dynamics of habit-formation models of economic theory, and thus, this study provides the first scientific basis for this type of preference modeling.     

Latent change classes in dichotomous data

Changes in dichotomous data caused by treatments can be analyzed by means of the so-called linear logistic model with relaxed assumptions (LLRA). The LLRA does not require observable criteria representing a single underlying latent trait, but it postulates the generalizability of the treatment effects over criteria and subjects. To test this latter crucial assumption, the mixture LLRA was proposed that allows directly unobservable types of subjects to have different treatment effects. As the earlier methods for estimating the parameters of the mixture LLRA have specific drawbacks, a further method based on the conditional maximum likelihood principle will be presented here. In contrast to the earlier conditional methods, it uses all of the dichotomous change data while having fewer parameters. Further, its goodness-of-fit tests become more sensitive to a falsely specified number of change-types even though the treatment effects are biased. For typically occurring small to moderate sample sizes, however, parametric bootstrapping of the distributions of the fit statistics is recommended for performing hypotheses tests. Finally, three applications of the new method to empirical data are described: first, about the effect of the so-called Trager psychophysical integration, second, about the effect of autogenic therapy on patients with psychosomatic symptoms, and, third, about the effect of religious education on the attitude towards sects. The mixture LLRA is implemented in the menu-driven program MIXLLRA which can be obtained from Ivo Ponocny via e-mail (ivo.ponocny@univie.ac.at).     

Treadmill Gait Analysis Characterizes Gait Alterations in Parkinson's Disease and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Mouse Models

The effect of anxiety on learning and performance of a complex motor task was determined. In addition the effects of two stressors—competition and failure—and the interactions between these stressors and anxiety were investigated. 40 high and 40 low anxiety Ss (selected by the Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale) learned and performed a coincident timing task. Competition was presented by offering the Ss a monetary reward for the best performance, while failure was manipulated by giving false knowledge of results and indicating that the performance level was inferior. Results showed that Ss low in anxiety performed significantly better than Ss high in anxiety during the initial learning of a complex motor task. No difference was found between Ss extreme in anxiety once the task was well-learned. Competition and failure did not affect performance or interact with the anxiety level of Ss.     

How crucial is the response format for the testing effect?

Combining study and test trials during learning is more beneficial for long-term retention than repeated study without testing (i.e., the testing effect). Less is known about the relative efficacy of different response formats during testing. We tested the hypothesis that overt testing (typing responses on a keyboard) during a practice phase benefits later memory more than covert testing (only pressing a button to indicate successful retrieval). In Experiment 1, three groups learned 40 word pairs either by repeatedly studying them, by studying and overtly testing them, or by studying and covertly testing them. In Experiment 2, only the two testing conditions were manipulated in a within-subjects design. In both experiments, participants received cued recall tests after a short (~19 min) and a long (1 week) retention interval. In Experiment 1, all groups performed equally well at the short retention interval. The overt testing group reliably outperformed the repeated study group after 1 week, whereas the covert testing group performed insignificantly different from both these groups. Hence, the testing effect was demonstrated for overt, but failed to show for covert testing. In Experiment 2, overtly tested items were better and more quickly retrieved than those covertly tested. Further, this does not seem to be due to any differences in retrieval effort during learning. To conclude, overt testing was more beneficial for later retention than covert testing, but the effect size was small. Possible explanations are discussed.