Experimental evidence that exerting effort increases meaning.

Efficiency demands that we work smarter and not harder, but is this better for our wellbeing? Here, we ask if exerting effort on a task can increase feelings of meaning and purpose. In six studies (N = 2883), we manipulated how much effort participants exerted on a task and then assessed how meaningful they found those tasks. In Studies 1 and 2, we presented hypothetical scenarios whereby participants imagined themselves (or others) exerting more or less effort on a writing task, and then asked participants how much meaning they believed they (or others) would derive.

Sad Art Gives Voice to Our Own Sadness.

People tend to show greater liking for expressions of sadness when these expressions are described as art. Why does this effect arise? One obvious hypothesis would be that describing something as art makes people more likely to regard it as fictional, and people prefer expressions of sadness that are not real. We contrast this obvious hypothesis with a hypothesis derived from the philosophical literature.

Third-party evaluators perceive AI as more compassionate than expert humans.

Empathy connects us but strains under demanding settings. This study explored how third parties evaluated AI-generated empathetic responses versus human responses in terms of compassion, responsiveness, and overall preference across four preregistered experiments. Participants (N = 556) read empathy prompts describing valenced personal experiences and compared the AI responses to select non-expert or expert humans.

Symptom Screening for Hospitalized Pediatric Patients With Cancer: A Randomized Clinical Trial.

Importance: Pediatric patients with cancer experience severely bothersome symptoms during treatment. It was hypothesized that symptom screening and provision of symptom reports to the health care team would reduce symptom burden in pediatric patients with cancer.

Objective: To determine if daily symptom screening and provision of symptom reports to the health care team was associated with lower total symptom burden as measured by the Symptom Screening in Pediatrics Tool (SSPedi) compared to usual care among pediatric patients with cancer admitted to a hospital or seen in a clinic daily for at least 5 days.

Health Quality 5.0: What Does Co-Creation Have to Do With It?

In this latest article in Leslee Thompson's Health Quality 5.0 series, she discusses the slow progress of patient engagement in healthcare over the past two decades, emphasizing the need for co-creation where patients and providers collaborate equally. It explores the challenges of overcoming traditional power dynamics and integrating patient knowledge into healthcare systems.

People are increasingly bored in our digital age.

In an era where entertainment is effortlessly at our fingertips, one would assume that people are less bored than ever. Yet, reports of boredom are higher now than compared to the past. This rising trend is concerning because chronic boredom can undermine well-being, learning, and behaviour.

Direct and indirect longitudinal relationships among self-efficacy, job performance and career advancements.

The present study examined the longitudinal relations among work self-efficacy beliefs, job performance and career success, defined as objective career advancements. We argued that job performance would mediate both the influence of worker's self-efficacy beliefs on career success and the influence of career success on subsequent self-efficacy beliefs. The participants were 976 employees of one of the largest companies in Italy, assessed at three time points (i.

Photobiomodulation as Medicine: Low-Level Laser Therapy (LLLT) for Acute Tissue Injury or Sport Performance Recovery.

: Low-level laser therapy (LLLT) has gained traction in sports and exercise medicine as a non-invasive therapeutic for preconditioning the body, exertion recovery, repair and injury rehabilitation. LLLT is hypothesized to modulate cellular metabolism, tissue microenvironment(s) and to decrease inflammation while posing few adverse risks. This review critically examines the evidence-base for LLLT effectiveness focusing on immediate care settings and acute/subacute applications (<6 months post-injury).

School Mask Mandates and COVID-19: The Challenge of Using Difference-in-Differences Analysis of Observational Data to Estimate the Effectiveness of a Public Health Intervention.

Background: There are considerable challenges when using difference-in-differences (DiD) analysis of ecological data to estimate the effectiveness of public health interventions in rapidly changing situations.

Objective: To discuss the shortcomings of DiD methodology for the estimation of the effects of public health interventions using ecological data.

Design: As an example, the authors consider an analysis that used DiD methodology and reported a causal reduction in COVID-19 cases due to the maintenance of school mask mandates.

Perceptions and behaviors toward first-generation, low-income individuals in organizations.

As universities and employers strive for greater socioeconomic diversity, understanding First-Generation, Low-Income (FGLI) status as a dimension of diversity is crucial. This review examines how FGLI individuals-who are the first in their families to attain higher education, achieve professional occupations and/or come from low-income backgrounds-are perceived and treated in academic and professional settings. Our review shows negative perceptions of FGLIs on traits like agency and cultural fit often lead to their exclusion.

Evolution of the Moral Lexicon.

Morality is central to social well-being and cognition, and moral lexicon is a key device for human communication of moral concepts and experiences. How was the moral lexicon formed? We explore this open question and hypothesize that words evolved to take on abstract moral meanings from concrete and grounded experiences. We test this hypothesis by analyzing semantic change and formation of over 800 words from the English Moral Foundations Dictionary and the Historical Thesaurus of English over the past hundreds of years.

Meta-learned models beyond and beneath the cognitive.

I propose that meta-learned models, and in particular the situation-aware deployment of "learning-to-infer" modules can be advantageously extended to domains commonly thought to lie outside the cognitive, such as motivations and preferences on one hand, and the effectuation of micro- and coping-type behaviors.

Twitter (X) use predicts substantial changes in well-being, polarization, sense of belonging, and outrage.

In public debate, Twitter (now X) is often said to cause detrimental effects on users and society. Here we address this research question by querying 252 participants from a representative sample of U.S.

Quantifying the emergence of moral foundational lexicon in child language development.

Theorists have argued that morality builds on several core modular foundations. When do different moral foundations emerge in life? Prior work has explored the conceptual development of different aspects of morality in childhood. Here, we offer an alternative approach to investigate the developmental emergence of moral foundations through the lexicon, namely the words used to talk about moral foundations.

The fable of state self-control.

Trait self-control is highly valued, often equated with moral righteousness and associated with numerous positive life outcomes. This paper challenges the conventional conflation of trait self-control and state self-control. We suggest that while trait self-control is consistently linked to success, state self-control is not the causal mechanism driving these benefits.

Valuations of target items are drawn towards unavailable decoy items due to prior expectations.

When people make choices, the items they consider are often embedded in a context (of other items). How this context affects the valuation of the specific item is an important question. High-value context might make items appear less attractive because of contrast-the tendency to normalize perception of an object relative to its background-or more attractive because of assimilation-the tendency to group objects together.

Exploratory exploitation and exploitative exploration: The phenomenology of play and the computational dynamics of search.

I argue for a more complicated but nonetheless computationally feasible and algorithmically intelligible interplay between exploration and exploitation and for admitting into our conceptual toolkit regimes of and that can enhance the novelty and usefulness of the results of either problemistic or serendipitous search.

Regulator and agent sophistication as an explanation-generating engine for proxy failure dynamics.

I consider the dynamics of regulator-agent interactions in situations in which there are significant mismatches in their abilities to discern and register information and calculate and act upon successful inferences.

Commentary: Pricing Cataract (and Other Straightforward) Surgeries - A Policy Perspective to Build Capacity, Value and Innovation.

Aligning with Crump and colleagues' (2024) conclusions on cataract surgery, this article champions a level playing field for expanding surgical capacities for straightforward surgeries. It is agnostic toward for-profit or not-for-profit models. It argues for experimenting with new ambulatory facilities to meet urgent needs, emphasizing Ontario's successful two-decade experience with models such as the Kensington Eye Institute.

Body mass index-dependent shifts along large-scale gradients in human cortical organization explain dietary regulatory success.

Making healthy dietary choices is essential for keeping weight within a normal range. Yet many people struggle with dietary self-control despite good intentions. What distinguishes neural processing in those who succeed or fail to implement healthy eating goals? Does this vary by weight status? To examine these questions, we utilized an analytical framework of gradients that characterize systematic spatial patterns of large-scale neural activity, which have the advantage of considering the entire suite of processes subserving self-control and potential regulatory tactics at the whole-brain level.

Efficiency neglect: Why people are pessimistic about the effects of increasing population.

In six studies, we find evidence of efficiency neglect: when thinking about the effects of population growth, people intuitively focus on increased demand while neglecting the changes in production efficiency that occur alongside, and often in response to, increased demand. In other words, people tend to think of others solely as consumers, rather than as consumers as well as producers. Efficiency neglect leads to beliefs that the real costs of some consumer goods are rising when they are actually decreasing and may contribute to antiimmigration sentiments because of the fear that increasing local population creates competition for fixed resources.

Health Quality 5.0: The Global Health Workforce Crisis - First Things First.

The future of quality is personal. Health Quality 5.0 moves people-centred, integrated health and social care systems to the forefront of our post-COVID-19 agenda - and that cannot happen without addressing our global workforce crisis.