BackgroundCompassion fatigue is often associated with moral distress in the nursing practice among registered nurses. Moral resilience is an important ability to maintain, restore, or promote their...

An interesting phenomenon called “hidden opportunity cost of time effect” was detected in intertemporal choices. The majority of our participants preferred the smaller but sooner (SS) option to the larger but later (LL) option if opportunity cost was explicit. However, a higher proportion of participants preferred the LL to SS option if opportunity cost was hidden. This shift violates the invariance principle and opens a new way to encourage future-oriented behavior. By simply mentioning the ‘obvious’ opportunity cost of alternatives, decision (...) makers can be more informed in prioritizing their long-term goals rather than short-term goals. (shrink)

Several functional magnetic resonance imaging studies have demonstrated abnormalities in static intra- and interhemispheric functional connectivity among diverse brain regions in patients with major depressive disorder. However, the dynamic changes in intra- and interhemispheric functional connectivity patterns in patients with MDD remain unclear. Fifty-eight first-episode, drug-naive patients with MDD and 48 age-, sex-, and education level-matched healthy controls underwent resting-state fMRI. Whole-brain functional connectivity, analyzed using the functional connectivity density approach, was decomposed into ipsilateral and contralateral functional connectivity. We computed (...) the intra- and interhemispheric dynamic FCD using a sliding window analysis to capture the dynamic patterns of functional connectivity. The temporal variability in functional connectivity was quantified as the variance of the dFCD over time. In addition, intra- and interhemispheric static FCD patterns were calculated. Associations between the dFCD variance and sFCD in abnormal brain regions and the severity of depressive symptoms were analyzed. Compared to HCs, patients with MDD showed lower interhemispheric dFCD variability in the inferior/middle frontal gyrus and decreased sFCD in the medial prefrontal cortex/anterior cingulate cortex and posterior cingulate cortex/precuneus in both intra- and interhemispheric comparisons. No significant correlations were found between any abnormal dFCD variance or sFCD at the intra- and interhemispheric levels and the severity of depressive symptoms. Our results suggest intra- and interhemispheric functional connectivity alterations in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and default mode network regions involved in cognition, execution and emotion. Furthermore, our study emphasizes the essential role of altered interhemispheric communication dynamics in the DLPFC in patients with MDD. These findings contribute to our understanding of the pathophysiology of MDD. (shrink)

A surprisingly large number of lottery prizes go unclaimed every year. This leads us to suspect that what people bet on is not only money, but also good mood. We conducted three studies to explain, from an emotional perspective, why people play lottery games. We first conducted two survey studies to assess mood state reported by online (Study 1a) and offline lottery buyers (Study 1b) at different stages of lottery play. The results revealed that participants’ highest mood appeared before knowing (...) whether they had won. In Study 2, we manipulated the means of reward (lottery tickets vs. cash) and compared participants’ mood changes at different stages of a rewards game in the laboratory. We found the following: first, lottery group participants were generally in a better mood; second, 42% of lottery group participants did not come to the laboratory to collect scratch cards; and third, lottery group participants took more time to return to the laboratory to check their tickets than participants in the cash group. In Study 3, we examined whether priming good or bad mood could influence participants’ preferences for cash versus lottery tickets. The results revealed that participants who were primed for poor mood had a higher preference for lottery tickets compared with their good mood counterparts. These findings suggest that what our participants sought in lottery play was not only money, but improved mood. (shrink)