At your urging
Sexual desire, not hypersexuality, predicts self-regulation of sexual arousal
Maxwell Moholy et al.
Cognition and Emotion, Fall 2015, Pages 1505-1516
Abstract:
A person's ability to control their own sexual arousal is important both to reduce the risks associated with some sexual behaviours and to respond sexually with intimate partners. A lack of control over sexual urges is a proposed feature of "hypersexual disorder", though some evidence suggests that sexual desire predicts the self-regulation of sexual arousal better than hypersexuality. In the current study, a sample (N = 116) of men and women recruited from community ads viewed a series of 20-second neutral and sexual films. Before each sexual film, participants were instructed to increase their sexual arousal, decrease their sexual arousal or respond as usual. Higher levels of desire for sex with a partner consistently predicted failures to downregulate sexual arousal. Hypersexuality was unrelated. These findings replicate Winters et al.'s study and extend their findings by including upregulation, women, a new measure of hypersexuality and a higher-trial design.
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Exercising Willpower: Differences in Willpower Depletion among Athletes and Nonathletes
Adam Hoffer & Lisa Giddings
Contemporary Economic Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study presents the results from a controlled experiment designed to test for differences in willpower depletion between athletes and nonathletes. Individuals with more willpower are more likely to have high school and college degrees, higher earnings, better jobs, lower crime and poverty rates, and are less likely to be obese. Recent research has established that reserves of willpower get depleted, leaving individuals unable to carry out tasks that require further self-control. The experimental results show that after administering a willpower-draining task, athletes persisted for significantly longer - exhibited less willpower depletion - on an unsolvable puzzle than nonathletes.
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Reward currency modulates human risk preferences
Alexandra Rosati & Brian Hare
Evolution and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract
Money and biological rewards differ in many ways. Yet studies of human decision-making typically involve money, whereas nonhuman studies involve food. We therefore examined how context shifts human risk preferences to illuminate the evolution of decision-making. First, we assessed peoples' risk preferences across food, prizes, and money in a task where individuals received real rewards and learned about payoffs through experience. We found that people were relatively more risk-seeking for both food and prizes compared to money - indicating that people may treat abstract reward markers differently from concrete rewards. Second, we compared human risk preferences for food with the performance of our closest phylogenetic relatives, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus), in order to illuminate the evolutionary origins of human decision-making strategies. In fact, humans and chimpanzees were both relatively more risk-seeking compared to bonobos. Finally, we investigated why people respond differently to money versus concrete rewards when making decisions. We found that people were more risk-prone when making decisions about money that was constrained as a store of value, compared to money that could be freely exchanged. This shows that people are sensitive to money's usefulness as a store of value that can be used to acquire other types of rewards. Our results indicate that humans exhibit different preferences when making risky decisions about money versus food, an important consideration for comparative research. Furthermore, different psychological processes may underpin decisions about abstract rewards compared to concrete rewards.
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Time Compression and Saving Rates
David Aadland & Sherrill Shaffer
Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Economists have generally ignored the notion that perceived time may differ from clock time. Borrowing from the behavioral psychology literature, we investigate the case of time compression whereby perceived time passes more quickly than actual time. A framework is presented to embed time compression in economic models. We then apply the principle to a standard lifecycle permanent-income model and show how time compression produces age-dependent discounting and a motive for the accumulation of wealth.
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The surprising relationship between indecisiveness and impulsivity
Emily Barkley-Levenson & Craig Fox
Personality and Individual Differences, February 2016, Pages 1-6
Abstract:
We explore the relationship between indecisiveness and impulsivity using a variety of individual difference measures for each construct. We observe a positive, rather than negative, correlation between traditional measures of indecisiveness and impulsivity. Further analysis demonstrates that standard measures of indecisiveness are positively correlated specifically with dysfunctional impulsivity, and negatively correlated with functional impulsivity. Moreover, indecisiveness is positively and strongly associated specifically with impulsive urgency and lack of perseverance, but not with impulsive sensation-seeking or a lack of premeditation. Finally, we find that particular forms of indecisiveness, including maximizing due to 'high standards' and various 'perfectionistic' behaviors, do correlate negatively with standard measures of impulsivity. These findings provide insight into the multi-dimensional nature of both indecisiveness and impulsivity, and suggest divergent underlying mechanisms producing different forms of indecisive and impulsive behavior.