BACKGROUND During the last two decades, there have been spiritual/religious interventions in cancer patients to prevent or treat a range of physical problems, including managing chronic pain, coping with the disease, boosting hope and mental health. Although societies are of different faiths and belief systems, what they all share is spirituality. OBJECTIVES Upon this we put forward the hypot...

Recent experimental evidence from dictator games suggests that proposers take money from receivers when taking is an option, and that many proposers are reluctant to play the game. This paper proposes a behavioral model with two components: a choice correspondence that depends on the endowed allocation and the menu of allocations available, and a preference ordering over endowment/menu pairs. T...

Loving kindness is a form of meditation involving directed well-wishing, typically supported by the silent repetition of phrases such as "may all beings be happy," to foster a feeling of selfless love. Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess the neural substrate of loving kindness meditation in experienced meditators and novices. We first assessed group differences in blood...

Kindness involves care and non-judgmental understanding toward someone. As a prosocial inclination, kindness would increase the possibility of favorable interaction with the environment, with a successful adjustment of one's response in novel or challenging circumstances, taking into account rules or goals. This adjustment ability is commonly referred to as executive functions, dependent on the...