The study of other non-biological factors that may be related to quality of life has been limited practically to social support and the emotional state. This study highlights the importance of these factors independently from the clinical state, as well as the existence of other psychological and behavioural factors that are also related.

No abstract

Humans and other animals accumulate resources, or wealth, by making successive risky decisions. If and how risk attitudes vary with wealth remains an open question. Here humans accumulated reward by accepting or rejecting successive monetary gambles within arbitrarily defined temporal contexts. Risk preferences changed substantially toward risk aversion as reward accumulated within a context, and blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) signals in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (PFC) tracked the latent growth of cumulative economic outcomes. Risky behavior was captured by a computational model in which reward prompts an adaptive update to the function that links utilities to choices. These findings can be understood if humans have evolved economic decision policies that fail to maximize overall expected value but reduce variance in cumulative outcomes, thereby ensuring that resources remain above a critical survival threshold.

No abstract

Orienting attention exogenously to a location can have two different consequences on processing subsequent stimuli appearing at that location: positive (facilitation) at short intervals and negative (inhibition of return) at long ones. In the present experiments, we manipulated the frequency of targets and responses associated with them. Results showed that, even at long SOAs, where IOR is usually observed, facilitation was observed for infrequent targets at the same time that IOR was measured for frequent targets. These results are difficult to explain on the basis of either task set modulation of attentional capture or task set modulation of subsequent orienting processes. In contrast, we offer an explanation by which the different cuing effects can be considered as different manifestations of attentional capture on target processing, depending on the task set.