The effect of episodic foresight on intertemporal decision-making: the role of future self-continuity and perceived control.

To investigate the mechanism of episodic foresight of different valences on intertemporal decision-making, this study examined the mediating role of future self-continuity in the influence of episodic foresight on intertemporal decision-making and the moderating role of perceived control in two experiments. The results found that (1) future self-continuity mediated the effect of episodic foresight on individuals' intertemporal decision-making; and (2) perceived control moderated the indirect effect of episodic foresight on intertemporal decision-making through future self-continuity. Under low perceived control, individuals with positive episodic foresight had stronger future self-continuity and preferred future options, while individuals with negative episodic foresight had lower future self-continuity. In contrast, under high perceived control, individuals with different episodic foresight potencies did not show significant differences in their future self-continuity levels, but all showed higher levels and tended to choose the delayed option when faced with an intertemporal choice. From the perspective of the self-cognition, this study provided new insights into the relationship between episodic foresight and intertemporal decision-making and the psychological mechanisms of intertemporal decision-making.

Melatonin promotes cardiomyocyte proliferation and heart repair in mice with myocardial infarction via miR-143-3p/Yap/Ctnnd1 signaling pathway.

The neonatal heart possesses the ability to proliferate and the capacity to regenerate after injury; however, the mechanisms underlying these processes are not fully understood. Melatonin has been shown to protect the heart against myocardial injury through mitigating oxidative stress, reducing apoptosis, inhibiting mitochondrial fission, etc. In this study, we investigated whether melatonin regulated cardiomyocyte proliferation and promoted cardiac repair in mice with myocardial infarction (MI), which was induced by ligation of the left anterior descending coronary artery. We showed that melatonin administration significantly improved the cardiac functions accompanied by markedly enhanced cardiomyocyte proliferation in MI mice. In neonatal mouse cardiomyocytes, treatment with melatonin (1 µM) greatly suppressed miR-143-3p levels. Silencing of miR-143-3p stimulated cardiomyocytes to re-enter the cell cycle. On the contrary, overexpression of miR-143-3p inhibited the mitosis of cardiomyocytes and abrogated cardiomyocyte mitosis induced by exposure to melatonin. Moreover, Yap and Ctnnd1 were identified as the target genes of miR-143-3p. In cardiomyocytes, inhibition of miR-143-3p increased the protein expression of Yap and Ctnnd1. Melatonin treatment also enhanced Yap and Ctnnd1 protein levels. Furthermore, Yap siRNA and Ctnnd1 siRNA attenuated melatonin-induced cell cycle re-entry of cardiomyocytes. We showed that the effect of melatonin on cardiomyocyte proliferation and cardiac regeneration was impeded by the melatonin receptor inhibitor luzindole. Silencing miR-143-3p abrogated the inhibition of luzindole on cardiomyocyte proliferation. In addition, both MT1 and MT2 siRNA could cancel the beneficial effects of melatonin on cardiomyocyte proliferation. Collectively, the results suggest that melatonin induces cardiomyocyte proliferation and heart regeneration after MI by regulating the miR-143-3p/Yap/Ctnnd1 signaling pathway, providing a new therapeutic strategy for cardiac regeneration.

Toward a mental arithmetic process in risky choices.

Mainstream theories about decision-making under risk suggest that risky decisions are made by choosing the option that offers the highest mathematical expectation. The present event-related potentials (ERPs) study investigated the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying risky choice by contrasting a preferential choice task with an expected value choice task. The ERP data revealed that (1) the computational difficulty, which would be expected to influence a compensatory process, affected the slow wave only when participants were forced to choose the option with the highest expectation; and that (2) the difference in the minimum outcome dimension between two options, which would be expected to be influential in a heuristic process, affected the P300 and slow wave when participants were asked to choose the preferred option. Our findings provide neural evidence that preferential choice is not based on an expectation computation and thus raised the question of whether expectation theories can provide an adequate description of individual risky decisions.

Early Departure, Early Revival: A ''Free From Care'' Account of Negative Temporal Discounting.

According to the positive temporal discounting theory and our relevant observations, when faced with future losses, people should, and do, prefer delayed negative events (e.g., deferring paying taxes, debts, or tickets), which can lead to substantial individual and societal costs. However, a counterexample has been identified and it appears to depart from the prediction of positive temporal discounting when faced with negative events. This study proposed and investigated the novel free from care account for the reverse preference. Results of five laboratory and field studies showed that students preferred an immediate negative event (i.e., an English oral exam) when "something tying one up" was imposed, in which coping with a distraction induced by such a situation could play a mediating role. In particular, the addition of "something tying one up" was found to be an effective behavioral nudge in terms of reliability and reproducibility and should be simple for potential users to follow. Specifically, the association between being tied up and undergoing a negative event immediately in the present studies mirrored the association between outgroup threat and intergroup cooperation in the Robbers Cave experiment.

Introducing Upfront Money Can Decrease Discounting in Intertemporal Choices with Losses.

People generally tend to advance gains and postpone losses in intertemporal choice. Jiang et al. (2014) recently showed that adding upfront losses or gains to both smaller and sooner (SS) and larger and later (LL) rewards can decrease people's discounting. To account for this decrease, they proposed the salience hypothesis, which states that introducing upfront losses or gains makes the money dimension more salient than not, thus increasing people's preference for LL rewards. Considering that decreasing the discounting of delayed losses is imperative and that most previous studies have focused on intertemporal choices with gains, in the current paper we conducted two experiments and used hypothetical money outcomes to examine whether the effect of upfront money could be extended to intertemporal choices with losses. The results showed that when both SS and LL intertemporal losses were combined with an upfront loss or gain, people's discounting rate decreased and the preference for the SS option increased. This finding further supports the salience account.

Pain now or later: an outgrowth account of pain-minimization.

The preference for immediate negative events contradicts the minimizing loss principle given that the value of a delayed negative event is discounted by the amount of time it is delayed. However, this preference is understandable if we assume that the value of a future outcome is not restricted to the discounted utility of the outcome per se but is complemented by an anticipated negative utility assigned to an unoffered dimension, which we termed the "outgrowth." We conducted three studies to establish the existence of the outgrowth and empirically investigated the mechanism underlying the preference for immediate negative outcomes. Study 1 used a content analysis method to examine whether the outgrowth was generated in accompaniment with the delayed negative events. The results revealed that the investigated outgrowth was composed of two elements. The first component is the anticipated negative emotions elicited by the delayed negative event, and the other is the anticipated rumination during the waiting process, in which one cannot stop thinking about the negative event. Study 2 used a follow-up investigation to examine whether people actually experienced the negative emotions they anticipated in a real situation of waiting for a delayed negative event. The results showed that the participants actually experienced a number of negative emotions when waiting for a negative event. Study 3 examined whether the existence of the outgrowth could make the minimizing loss principle work. The results showed that the difference in pain anticipation between the immediate event and the delayed event could significantly predict the timing preference of the negative event. Our findings suggest that people's preference for experiencing negative events sooner serves to minimize the overall negative utility, which is divided into two parts: the discounted utility of the outcome itself and an anticipated negative utility assigned to the outgrowth.

Is making a risky choice based on a weighting and adding process? An eye-tracking investigation.

The debate about whether making a risky choice is based on a weighting and adding process has a long history and is still unresolved. To address this long-standing controversy, we developed a comparative paradigm. Participants' eye movements in 2 risky choice tasks that required participants to choose between risky options in single-play and multiple-play conditions were separately compared with those in a baseline task in which participants naturally performed a deliberate calculation following a weighting and adding process. The results showed that, when participants performed the multiple-play risky choice task, their eye movements were similar to those in the baseline task, suggesting that participants may use a weighting and adding process to make risky choices in multiple-play conditions. In contrast, participants' eye movements were different in the single-play risky choice task versus the baseline task, suggesting that participants were not likely to use a weighting and adding process to make risky choices in single-play conditions and were more likely to use a heuristic process. We concluded that an expectation-based index for predicting risk preferences is applicable in multiple-play conditions but not in single-play conditions, implying the need to improve current theories that postulate the use of a heuristic process.