Greater Risk Taking in Cosmetic Surgery Acceptance and History: An Experimental and Computational Study.

Cosmetic surgery is ever more affordable and accessible, but carries physical and psychological risks. Yet, no study to date has directly examined risk-taking behaviour under controlled conditions, beyond self-report and in relation to cosmetic surgery attitudes. We used the Balloon Analogue Risk Task and advanced computational modelling to measure decision-making behaviour and identify the latent parameters driving behaviour associated with cosmetic surgery attitudes in women with no cosmetic surgery history (N = 265) and a subsample of women with a cosmetic surgery history (N = 24).

Body appearance values modulate risk aversion in eating restriction.

The understanding of eating disorders is hindered by the lack of integration between existing psychosocial and neurobiological approaches. We address this problem by developing a novel transdiagnostic and computational approach to eating restriction decisions. We first validated a novel paradigm which extends an established monetary risk task to involve body stimuli with psychosocial values.

Mirror-view reverses somatoparaphrenia: dissociation between first- and third-person perspectives on body ownership.

Right-hemisphere stroke can lead to the somatoparaphrenic delusion that parts of one's own body belong to someone else. To our knowledge, no previous study has experimentally assessed the sense of body part ownership in somatoparaphrenic patients when they see the body from a third-person perspective, as in a mirror. In alternating trials, we provided either direct first-person perspective vision of the arms, or indirect third-person perspective vision via a mirror in the frontal plane.

Motor awareness in anosognosia for hemiplegia: experiments at last!

Anosognosia for hemiplegia (AHP) is the apparent inability to acknowledge contralesional paralysis, typically following right-hemisphere lesions. Here, we review studies that regard AHP as a specific deficit of motor awareness and explain its symptoms by employing an established computational model of motor control. These accounts propose that AHP arises from a breakdown in the monitoring of intended and actual movement.