Altruism medicine

Cooperation is widespread across life, but its existence can be threatened by exploitation. The rise of obligate social cheaters that are incapable of contributing to a necessary cooperative function can lead to the loss of that function. In the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum , obligate social cheaters cannot form dead stalk cells and in chimeras instead form living spore cells. This gives them a competitive advantage within chimeras. However, obligate cheaters of this kind have thus far not been found in nature, probably because they are often enough in clonal populations that they need to retain the ability to produce stalks...

Analyzing the sustainable decision-making mechanism between household consumption and education investment can theoretically develop education. This study uses the continuous-time utility model to demonstrate the independent characteristics of consumption and education investment, as well as the principle of decision incompatibility in the decision-making process of the utility maximization problem. Then, we establish a three-phase logarithmic utility model to obtain the intertemporal decision-making path of a family...

It is widely agreed that living kidney donation is permitted but living kidney sales are not. Call this the Received View. One way to support the Received View is to appeal to a particular understanding of the conditions under which living kidney transplantation is permissible. It is often claimed that donors must act altruistically, without the expectation of payment and for the sake of another. Call this the Altruism Requirement. On the conventional interpretation, the Altruism Requirement is a moral fact...

HIV community peer navigators and treatment officers are important sources of information and guidance for people living with HIV. We conducted an anonymous online survey with members of the treatment outreach network of the Australian National Association of People Living with HIV. The survey explored understandings and acceptance of HIV cure research and was disseminated before and following an interactive workshop on HIV cure. We demonstrated an improvement in understandings of HIV cure science and increased willingness to participate in interventional clinical trials after the workshop...

The purpose of this article is to investigate the manifestation of creativity levels and criteria, conditioned by the ratio of personal qualities, motivational orientation, and contributing and hindering factors. These elements are regarded as pivotal factors in ensuring mental health and socio-psychological maturity. The study involved 300 managers from the private and public sectors of the Republic of Armenia. The research contributes to the academic discourse by introducing novel correlations between scientific concepts of creativity, enriching the theoretical foundations of creativity and motivation, creativity and personal qualities, and creativity and its contributing and hindering factors...

BACKGROUND: The efficacy of vaccination depends on its widespread adoption, making vaccine uptake not just a personal health behavior but also a prosocial one. Previous research has shown that everyday moments of co-experienced positive emotions (positivity resonance) are associated with higher prosocial tendencies, and these moments, in turn, prospectively predict people's pandemic hygiene behaviors. Yet, limited research has explored how moments of positivity resonance may have predicted greater COVID-19 vaccine intentions during the early months of the pandemic...

PURPOSE: Our study aimed to delve beyond a surface-level understanding and explore the various dimensions of the global health curriculum from the perspective of both learners and educators using the Context, Input, Process, and Product (CIPP) model. METHODS: From 2020 to 2021, interviews were conducted with a total of 10 individuals, including five students who had taken at least one elective course and at least one elective research course, three teaching assistants (TA), and two faculty members who had taken more than four global health courses in multiple phases in the global health curriculum...

OBJECTIVE: To identify factors that impact parental willingness to consent to research studies conducted for their children during visits to pediatric emergency departments (EDs). METHODS: Parents and guardians of children receiving care in our pediatric ED were approached and asked if they would be willing to let their child participate in a research study requiring the child to complete an electronic questionnaire. No such questionnaire existed, however, because the primary purpose was to ascertain the parent's willingness to let their child participate...

Both the basic human values approach and the economic preference approach have been developed and applied to represent fundamental drivers of human behavior in various domains by measuring people's underlying preferences and motivations. Both of them have been used, however, in isolation from each other, the former primarily in social psychology studies and the latter mainly in economic studies. But how similar are they? Finding that they differ may suggest that combining them to explain human behavior might be beneficial...

BACKGROUND: There is limited systematic information available about the perspectives of participants enrolled in intensive combination HIV cure-related trials inclusive of an extended analytical treatment interruption (ATI). OBJECTIVE: To assess and understand experiences of people with HIV involved in a combination HIV cure-related trial with an extended ATI. METHODS: The trial included five interventions and was followed by an ATI lasting up to 52 wk...

INTRODUCTION: Vaccine uptake is influenced by a variety of factors. Behavioral Insights (BI) can be used to address vaccine hesitancy to understand the factors that influence the decision to take or refuse a vaccine. METHODOLOGY: This two-part study consisted of a survey designed to identify the influence of various drivers of people's COVID-19 vaccination status and their intention to take the vaccine in Ghana, as well as an experiment to test which of several behaviorally informed message frames had the greatest effect on vaccine acceptance...

BACKGROUND: Need-altruism (a preference to help people in need) and kin-altruism (a preference to help kin over non-kin) underlie two hypotheses for voluntary blood donation: (i) Need-altruism underlies motivations for volunteer blood donation and (ii) Black people express a stronger preference for kin-altruism, which is a potential barrier to donation. This paper tests these hypotheses and explores how need- and kin-altruism are associated with wider altruistic motivations, barriers, and strategies to encourage donation...

Chronic kidney failure poses a risk to human life and quality of life. Patients often receive renal replacement therapy or a kidney transplant, with the latter considered superior, though often inaccessible due to long waiting lists. While most kidney donations originate from the deceased, Israel has transformed as the first country where most kidney donations originate from altruistic living donors. This creates a social environment in which patients are tasked with kidney solicitation which often occurs on digital social networks...

Resident consumption is an important link to smooth the domestic circulation and promote the economy to achieve high-quality development. To stimulate the vitality of residents' consumption and achieve the expansion and quality of consumption, we should not only focus on the scale and willingness of residents to consume, but also consider the motivation of consumption. The paper analyzes the impact of intergenerational income mobility on residents' marginal propensity to consume and consumption altruism motive by expanding the Over Lapping Generation Models and combining the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) data...

BACKGROUND: Various strategies against COVID-19 have been adopted in different countries, with vaccination and mask-wearing being widely used as self-preventive interventions. However, the underlying structure of these behaviors and related factors remain unclear. PURPOSE: In this study, we aimed to explore the network structure of preventive behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic and their underlying factors, incorporating age and sex in the network. METHODS: We used a multi-center sample of 20,863 adults who were vaccinated against COVID-19 in China between April 1, 2021, and June 1, 2021...

Personality traits consistently relate to and allow predicting body mass index (BMI), but these associations may not be adequately captured with existing inventories' domains or facets. Here, we aimed to test the limits of how accurately BMI can be predicted from and described with personality traits. We used three large datasets (combined N ≈ 100,000) with nearly 700 personality assessment items to (a) empirically identify clusters of personality traits linked to BMI and (b) identify relatively small sets of items that predict BMI as accurately as possible...

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INTRODUCTION: Pregnant women have been historically excluded from interventional research. While recent efforts have been made to improve their involvement, there remains a disparity in the evidence base for treatments available to pregnant women compared with the non-pregnant population. A significant barrier to the enrolment of pregnant women within research is risk perception and a poor understanding of decision-making in this population. OBJECTIVE: Assess the risk perception and influences on decision-making in pregnant women, when considering whether to enrol in a hypothetical interventional research study...

Reciprocity is a fundamental element in social interactions and implies an adequate response to the previous actions of our interactant. It is thus crucial to detect if a person is cooperating, deceiving, or cheating, to properly respond. However, older adults have been shown to have a lower ability to detect reciprocity compared to younger adults, partially tying this decline to cognitive functions. Another likely association to reciprocity in literature is made with personality dispositions, i.e., agreeableness, altruism, and empathic concern, and Theory of Mind (ToM)...

Chanting, an ancient ritual practiced in diverse cultures and traditions worldwide, has typically been employed for meditation, healing, self-awareness, and psychological growth. However, there is little understanding of the physiological and psychological benefits of chanting, and how vocalization might contribute to such effects. This study aimed to determine whether 12-minutes of group chanting, through vocal or silent repetition of the sound "om," would reduce stress and anxiety, while increasing feelings of social connection, and whether vocal chanting would yield stronger effects...