This quantity was introduced in 1969 by Cheeger [1] to bound from below the spectral gap of the Laplacian on compact Riemannian manifolds, and nowadays (1) is often called an isoperimetric inequality of the Cheeger type. The relationship between more general isoperimetric and certain Sobolev type inequalities was earlier considered by Maz’ya [2] (see for history, for example, [3, 4]). What was ...

Visual perspective taking (VPT) – people’s ability to represent the physical world from another person’s viewpoint – plays a fundamental role in social cognition. However, little is known about whether and when VPT can be triggered spontaneously without any explicit verbal prompting. In six studies, we measured spontaneous VPT as the tendency to read an ambiguous number from another agent’s ima...

This paper proposes a new approach for analyzing the relationship between macroeconomic factors and the income distribution. The conventional method of analysis is regression of summary inequality indices on variables such as the unemployment and inflation rates. Building on the lessons from recent advances in time-series econometrics, we suggest instead that one should first fit a parametric f...

Why is it so difficult to resist the desire to use social media? One possibility is that frequent social media users possess strong and spontaneous hedonic reactions to social media cues, which, in turn, makes it difficult to resist social media temptations. In two studies (total N = 200), we investigated less-frequent and frequent social media users' spontaneous hedonic reactions to social med...

“Health is a state of physical, social and psychological wellbeing, and not simply the absence of illness”. This definition, repeated ad infinitum since 1948, when it was adopted as its own by the World Health Organization (WHO), and although essentially sidelined by a large proportion of the disciplines traditionally responsible for the study of health, has taken on a new profile in the wake o...