Related papers: Everything's Fine
Pain is among the most salient of experiences while also, curiously, being among the most malleable. A large body of research has revealed that a multitude of explicit strategies can be used to effectively alter the attention-demanding…
Justification bias, wherein retirees may report poorer health to rationalize their retirement, poses a major concern to the widely-used measure of self-assessed health in retirement studies. This paper introduces a novel method for testing…
Different theories posit different sources for feelings of well-being and happiness. Appraisal theory grounds our emotional responses in our goals and desires and their fulfillment, or lack of fulfillment. Self Determination theory posits…
The origin of macroscopic complexity is traced in a wide range of systems (imunology, ecology, finance, marketing, etc) to the discrete and auto-catalytic (i.e. multiplicative) character of their elementary components. Even in the simplest…
People often receive good news that makes them feel better about the world around them, or bad news that makes them feel worse about it. This paper studies how the valence of news affects belief updating, absent functional and ego-relevant…
Normal anxiety is considered an adaptive response to the possible presence of danger, but is susceptible to dysregulation. Anxiety disorders are prevalent at high frequency in contemporary human societies, yet impose substantial disability…
Danger requires a strong rapid response. Speedy triggers are prone to false signals. False alarms can be costly, requiring strong negative regulators to oppose the initial triggers. Strongly opposed forces can easily be perturbed, leading…
Little is known about the microscopic physics that gave rise to inflation in our universe. There are many reasons to wonder if the underlying description requires a careful arrangement of ingredients or if inflation was the result of an…
When a large number of similar entities interact among each other and with their environment at a low scale, unexpected outcomes at higher spatio-temporal scales might spontaneously arise. This nontrivial phenomenon, known as emergence,…
Both neurobiological and environmental factors are known to play a role in the origin of schizophrenia, but no model has been proposed that accounts for both. This work presents a functional model of schizophrenia that merges psychodynamic…
Using the mechanics of creep in material sciences as a metaphor, we present a general framework to understand the evolution of financial, economic and social systems and to construct scenarios for the future. In a nutshell, highly…
Near-miss experiences are one of the main sources of intense emotions. Despite people's consistency when judging near-miss situations and when communicating about them, there is no integrated theoretical account of the phenomenon. In…
Mental stress is a vague though familiar concept that accounts for an agency of the good, the bad and the ugly, that operates in the brains of animated beings, in response to environmental stressors. In this work, we provide evidence for…
Is emotional well-being monotonically increasing in the level of income or does it reach a plateau at some income threshold, whereafter additional income does not contribute to further well-being? Conflicting answers to this question has…
Spontaneous switching events in most characterized genetic switches are rare, resulting in extremely stable epigenetic properties. We show how simple arguments lead to theories of the rate of such events much like the absolute rate theory…
Migraine (MGR) ranks first among diseases in terms of years of lost healthy life in young adult and adult women. Currently, there is no theory of MGR. This paper presents a complete theory of migraine that explains its etiology, symptoms,…
The feeling of good or bad luck occurs whenever there is an emotion contrast between an event and an easily accessible counterfactual alternative. This study suggests that cognitive simplicity plays a key role in the human ability to…
We study the associations between everyday economic decision-making quality and people's emotional states. Using high-frequency, highly disaggregated consumer "scanner" data, we show that the cost of poor decision-making is substantial, on…
Our Universe is a vast, tantalizing enigma - a mystery that has aroused humankind's innate curiosity for eons. Begging questions on alien lifeforms have been thus far unfruitful, even with the bounding advancements we have embarked upon in…
How subjective experience (i.e., consciousness) arises out of objective material processes has been called the hard problem. The neuroscience of consciousness has set out to find the sufficient conditions for consciousness and theoretical…