People sometimes choose to remain ignorant, even when information comes at low marginal costs and promises high utility. To investigate whether older adults enlist deliberate ignorance more than younger adults, potentially as an emotion-regulation tool, we presented a representative sample of 1,910 residents Germany with 13 scenarios in which knowledge could result substantial gains or losses. ...

In slogans used in public information, politics, and advertising, and also in titles of books, documentaries, or articles, ambiguity is often employed to pique the interest of the reader in the message that is conveyed. According to several theories of text processing, this deliberate ambiguity may gain greater appreciation than slogans employing other rhetorical means. A special form of delibe...

Previous research suggests differences in lip movement between deliberate and spontaneous facial expressions. We investigated within participant differences between deliberately posed and spontaneously occurring smiles during a directed facial action task. Using automated facial image analysis, we quantified lip corner movement during periods of visible Zygomaticus major activity. Onset and off...

Dear Colleagues, Your College is a member of the Wait Times Alliance (WTA). I had the privilege of representing you at a recent event on Parliament Hill to mark the 10th anniversary of the 2004 Health Accord. The most recent data show positive change by the provinces in wait times for 4 of the 5 procedures singled out as opportunities for improvement (radiation therapy, coronary artery bypass g...

BACKGROUND Hospital-treated deliberate self harm and suicide among older adults have rarely been examined at a national level. METHODS The Irish Central Statistics Office provided suicide and undetermined death data for 1980-2006. The National Registry of Deliberate Self Harm collected data relating to deliberate self harm presentations made in 2006-2008 to all 40 Irish hospital emergency dep...

Dynamic service settings—characterized by workers who interact with customers to deliver services in a rapidly changing, uncertain, and complex environment (e.g., hospitals)—play an important role in the economy. Organizational learning studies in these settings have largely investigated autonomous learning via cumulative experience as a strategy for performance improvement. Whether induced lea...

Mind wandering seems to be a prototypical feature of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). However, an important emerging distinction of mind-wandering types hinges on whether a given episode of mind wandering reflects a failure of executive control (spontaneous mind wandering) or the engagement of controlled processes for internal processing (deliberate mind wandering). Here we dist...

Deliberate practice leads to world-class excellence across domains. In the current investigation, we examined whether psychologically “wise” interventions targeting expectancies and values—stock antecedents of ordinary effortful behaviors—could motivate nonexperts to engage in deliberate practice and improve their achievement. As a preliminary, we developed and validated a novel task measure of...

Mind wandering seems to be a prototypical feature of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). However, an important emerging distinction of mind-wandering types hinges on whether a given episode of mind wandering reflects a failure of executive control (spontaneous mind wandering) or the engagement of controlled processes for internal processing (deliberate mind wandering). Here we dist...