Sexual ads trigger financial impatience in hungry men — but have the opposite effect in women

Anastasiya Tyshko
psypost.org
Originally posted 7 April 20

Here is an excerpt:

Previous research indicates that hungry people are prone to making impatient decisions and opt for immediate rather than delayed benefits. In the present study, researchers sought to test how the combination of hunger and exposure to sexual ads would affect people’s financial decisions.

“One of the reasons we were interested in this topic was the quite ambiguous effects of sex in advertising, as demonstrated in previous research. Moreover, we wanted to explore potentially interactive effects between two basic human drives (in our case linked to hunger and sexual arousal) on people’s financial decisions,” said study author Tobias Otterbring, an associate professor at Aarhus University.

To conduct the experiment, the researchers recruited 265 university students (51% female). All participants were randomly divided into three groups: one experimental and two controls. In the experimental condition, participants were shown sexual ads, while the two control groups viewed neutral ads or no ads at all. After this, all participants were asked to choose between receiving $35 in 20 days or $30 tomorrow. Lastly, participants rated how hungry they were during their participation in the study.

The results indicate that being exposed to sexual ads while being hungry increases the likelihood of making impatient financial decisions for men. For women, the combination of hunger and sexual ads, on the contrary, is linked to greater chances of being patient in one’s financial choices.

“Our findings indicate that men and women (or at least male and female undergraduates, which constituted our sample) make different financial decisions after visual exposure to ads with sexually arousing content, but that such sex differences only seem to apply to hungry rather than satiated individuals. According to our results, satiated men and women do not differ in their financial decisions after viewing sexually arousing ads,” Otterbring told PsyPost.

The info is here.

Billions spent rebuilding Notre Dame shows lack of morality among wealthy

Gillian Fulford
Indiana Daily News Column
Originally posted April 23, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

Estimates to end world hunger are between $7 and $265 billion a year, and surely with 2,208 billionaires in the world, a few hundred could spare some cash to help ensure people aren’t starving to death. There aren’t billionaires in the news rushing to give money toward food aid, but even the richest man in Europe donated to repair the church.

Repairing churches is not a life and death matter. Churches, while culturally and religiously significant, are not necessary for life in the way that nutritious food is. Being an absurdly wealthy person who only donates money for things you find aesthetically pleasing is morally bankrupt in a world where money could literally fund the end of world hunger.

This isn’t to say that rebuilding the Notre Dame is bad — preserving culturally significant places is important. But the Roman Catholic Church is the richest religious organization in the world — it can probably manage repairing a church without the help of wealthy donors.

At a time when there are heated protests in the streets of France over taxes that unfairly effect the poor, pledging money toward buildings seems fraught. Spending billions on unnecessary buildings is a slap in the face to French people fighting for equitable wealth and tax distribution.

The info is here.

Why Rich Kids Are So Good at the Marshmallow Test

Jessica McCrory Calarco
The Atlantic
Originally published June 1, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

This new paper found that among kids whose mothers had a college degree, those who waited for a second marshmallow did no better in the long run—in terms of standardized test scores and mothers’ reports of their children’s behavior—than those who dug right in. Similarly, among kids whose mothers did not have college degrees, those who waited did no better than those who gave in to temptation, once other factors like household income and the child’s home environment at age 3 (evaluated according to a standard research measure that notes, for instance, the number of books that researchers observed in the home and how responsive mothers were to their children in the researchers’ presence) were taken into account. For those kids, self-control alone couldn’t overcome economic and social disadvantages.

The failed replication of the marshmallow test does more than just debunk the earlier notion; it suggests other possible explanations for why poorer kids would be less motivated to wait for that second marshmallow. For them, daily life holds fewer guarantees: There might be food in the pantry today, but there might not be tomorrow, so there is a risk that comes with waiting. And even if their parents promise to buy more of a certain food, sometimes that promise gets broken out of financial necessity.

The information is here.

Don't make Important Decisions When You are Hungry

The Stomach-Derived Hormone Ghrelin Increases Impulsive Behavior

Rozita H Anderberg, Caroline Hansson, Maya Fenande and others
Neuropsychopharmacology (2016) 41, 1199–1209
doi:10.1038/npp.2015.297; published online 21 October 2015

Abstract

Impulsivity, defined as impaired decision making, is associated with many psychiatric and behavioral disorders, such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder as well as eating disorders. Recent data indicate that there is a strong positive correlation between food reward behavior and impulsivity, but the mechanisms behind this relationship remain unknown. Here we hypothesize that ghrelin, an orexigenic hormone produced by the stomach and known to increase food reward behavior, also increases impulsivity. In order to assess the impact of ghrelin on impulsivity, rats were trained in three complementary tests of impulsive behavior and choice: differential reinforcement of low rate (DRL), go/no-go, and delay discounting. Ghrelin injection into the lateral ventricle increased impulsive behavior, as indicated by reduced efficiency of performance in the DRL test, and increased lever pressing during the no-go periods of the go/no-go test. Central ghrelin stimulation also increased impulsive choice, as evidenced by the reduced choice for large rewards when delivered with a delay in the delay discounting test. In order to determine whether signaling at the central ghrelin receptors is necessary for maintenance of normal levels of impulsive behavior, DRL performance was assessed following ghrelin receptor blockade with central infusion of a ghrelin receptor antagonist. Central ghrelin receptor blockade reduced impulsive behavior, as reflected by increased efficiency of performance in the DRL task. To further investigate the neurobiological substrate underlying the impulsivity effect of ghrelin, we microinjected ghrelin into the ventral tegmental area, an area harboring dopaminergic cell bodies. Ghrelin receptor stimulation within the VTA was sufficient to increase impulsive behavior. We further evaluated the impact of ghrelin on dopamine-related gene expression and dopamine turnover in brain areas key in impulsive behavior control. This study provides the first demonstration that the stomach-produced hormone ghrelin increases impulsivity and also indicates that ghrelin can change two major components of impulsivity—motor and choice impulsivity.

The article is here.