Depression and rumination often co-occur in clinical populations, but it is not clear which causes which, or if both are manifestations of an underlying pathology. Does rumination simply exacerbate whatever affect a person is experiencing, or is it a negative experience in and of itself? In two experiments we answer this question by independently manipulating emotion and rumination. Participants were allocated to sad or neutral (in Experiment 1), or sad, neutral or happy (Experiment 2) mood conditions, via a combination of emotionally evocative music and autobiographical recall. Afterwards, in both studies, participants either ruminated by thinking about self-relevant statements or, in a control group, thought about self-irrelevant statements. Taken together, our data show that, independent of participants' mood, ruminators reported more negative affect relative to controls. The findings are consistent with theories suggesting that self-focus is itself unpleasant, and illustrate that depressive rumination comprises both affective and ruminative components, which could be targeted independently in clinical samples.

Moral dilemmas are a useful tool to investigate empirically, which parameters of a given situation modulate participants’ moral judgment, and in what way. In an effort to provide moral judgment data from a non-WEIRD culture, we provide the translation and validation of 48 classical moral dilemmas in Persian language. The translated dilemma set was submitted to a validation experiment with N = 82 Iranian participants. The four-factor structure of this dilemma set was confirmed; including Personal Force (Personal, Impersonal), Benefit Recipient (Self, Other), Evitability (Avoidable, Inevitable), and Intentionality (Accidental, Instrumental). When comparing moral judgments of Iranian participants to those of Spanish and Italian participants’ from previous research with the same dilemma set, differences emerged. Iranian participants’ moral judgments were more deontological (i.e., they refrained from harm), than Spanish and Italian participants. Religiosity made participants’ moral judgments more deontological, and also dysphoric mood resulted in a more deontological response style.

When making decisions in real-life, we may receive discrete pieces of evidence during a time period. Although subjects are able to integrate information from separate cues to improve their accuracy, confidence formation is controversial. Due to a strong positive relation between accuracy and confidence, we predicted that confidence followed the same characteristics as accuracy and would improve following the integration of information collected from separate cues. We applied a Random-dot-motion discrimination task in which participants had to indicate the predominant direction of dot motions by saccadic eye movement after receiving one or two brief stimuli (i.e., pulse(s)). The interval of two pulses (up to 1s) was selected randomly. Color-coded targets facilitated indicating confidence simultaneously. Using behavioral data, computational models, pupillometry and EEG methodology we show that in double-pulse trials: (i) participants improve their confidence resolution rather than reporting higher confidence comparing with single-pulse trials, (ii) the observed confidence follow neural and pupillometry markers of confidence, unlike in weak and brief single-pulse trials. Overall, our study showed improvement of associations between confidence and accuracy in decision results from the integration of stimulus separated by different temporal gaps.

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