Group items tagged

The impact of food on mental health

The original study by Hazan and Shaver

Original study by Pollack

Children are notoriously bad at delaying gratification to achieve later, greater rewards -and some are worse at waiting than others. Individual differences in the ability-to-wait have been attributed to self-control, in part because of evidence that long-delayers are more successful in later life (e.g.,Shoda, Mischel, & Peake, 1990. Here we provide evidence that, in addition to self-control, children's wait-times are modulated by an implicit, rational decision-making process that considers environmental reliability. We tested children (M= 4;6,N= 28) using a classic paradigm-the marshmallow task (Mischel, 1974)-in an environment demonstrated to be either unreliable or reliable. Children in the reliable condition waited significantly longer than those in the unreliable condition(p< 0.0005), suggesting that children's wait-times reflected reasoned beliefs about whether waiting would ultimately pay off. Thus, wait-times on sustained delay-of-gratification tasks (e.g., the marshmallow task) may not only reflect differences in self-control abilities, but also beliefs about the stability of the world.

Depressive disorders are among the most frequent psychiatric disorders, accounting for up to 30% of primary care service utilisation in developing countries in general, and Uganda in particular. However, delays in seeking treatment, misdiagnosis and non-specific treatments have compromised appropriate care for people with depression

This study documents that men and women experience and perform consumer shopping differently, and in ways consistent with adaptations to the sexually dimorphic foraging strategies utilized during recent human evol

Human cooperation is an evolutionary puzzle. Unlike other creatures, people frequently cooperate with genetically unrelated strangers, often in large groups, with people they will never meet again, and when reputation gains are small or absent. These patterns of cooperation cannot be explained by the nepotistic motives associated with the evolutionary theory of kin selection and
the selÆsh motives associated with signalling theory or the theory of reciprocal altruism. Here we show experimentally that the
altruistic punishment of defectors is a key motive for the explanation of cooperation. Altruistic punishment means that individuals punish, although the punishment is costly for them and yields no material gain. We show that cooperation nourishes if altruistic punishment is possible, and breaks down if it is ruled out