Altruistic responses to the most vulnerable involve sensorimotor processes.

Introduction: Why do people help strangers? Prior research suggests that empathy motivates bystanders to respond to victims in distress. However, this work has revealed relatively little about the role of the motor system in human altruism, even though altruism is thought to have originated as an active, physical response to close others in immediate need. We therefore investigated whether a motor preparatory response contributes to costly helping.

Neural correlates of overvaluation and the effort to save possessions in a novel decision task: An exploratory fMRI study.

Introduction: People exhibit a strong attachment to possessions, observed in behavioral economics through loss aversion using new items in the Endowment or IKEA effects and in clinical psychology through pathological trouble discarding domestic items in Hoarding Disorder. These fields rarely intersect, but both document a reticence to relinquish a possessed item, even at a cost, which is associated with feelings of loss but can include enhanced positive states as well.

Methods: To demonstrate the shared properties of these loss-related ownership effects, we developed the Pretzel Decorating Task (PDT), which concurrently measures overvaluation of one's own over others' items and feelings of loss associated with losing a possession, alongside enhanced positive appraisals of one's items and an effort to save them.

Third-Person Self-Talk Reduces Ebola Worry and Risk Perception by Enhancing Rational Thinking.

Background: During the fall of 2014, the threat of an Ebola outbreak gripped the United States (Poll, 8-12 October 2014; see Harvard School of Public Health & SSRS, 2014), creating a unique opportunity to advance basic knowledge concerning how emotion regulation works in consequential contexts and translate existing research in this area to inform public health and policy.

Method: We addressed these issues by examining whether third-person self-talk, a simple technique that promotes emotion regulation, could nudge people into reasoning about Ebola more rationally. In all, 1,257 people from across the United States were asked to write about their feelings about Ebola using their name or I (i.

Hoarders Only Discount Consumables and Are More Patient for Money.

Individuals with hoarding disorder (HD) excessively acquire and retain goods while also exhibiting characteristics of impulsivity and addiction. However, HD individuals do not always perform impulsively in experiments, they do not appear interested in money, and they exhibit many features of risk-aversion and future-planning. To examine impulsivity in HD, we compared validated community participants high and low in hoarding tendencies on questionnaire measures of hoarding and impulsivity as well as a standard experimental measure of impulsivity (intertemporal discounting) that was modified to compare decisions about money, pens, and snacks.