High obesity rates among Hispanic children are a critical health concern, highlighting the need to understand factors that may underlie these disparities. Previous studies suggested parent feeding practices (i.e., pressure to eat, restriction, and food monitoring) are important factors affecting childhood obesity. Understanding factors affecting parent’s use of feeding practices is essential for developing interventions to combat childhood obesity in Hispanic families. Acculturation influences these practices, with more-acculturated Hispanic mothers favoring feeding practices related to indulgent feeding, while less-acculturated mothers tend toward feeding practices that are more authoritarian. However, the process through which acculturation results in the transitioning from behaviors consistent with an authoritarian feeding to those of an indulgent feeding has not been explored. This study investigates the associations between acculturation, partner relationship quality, parenting stress, and parent feeding practices within a sample of Hispanic mothers and their child (n = 99). Findings revealed that stronger orientation toward mainstream cultural values positively correlates with increased utilization of food monitoring practices. Furthermore, partner relationship quality mediates the association between parenting stress and food monitoring. These findings can inform the development of effective strategies to promote healthier outcomes for Hispanic children, contributing to the broader effort to address childhood obesity in this population.

Functional imaging studies have revealed the default mode network (DMN) activates when people are at rest. However, generally only minimal instructions were provided among those studies. Our goal in this study was to demonstrate how resting state activity varies with the knowledge of being watched. In this study, we used two distinct manipulations to address this question: first, we described two separate scans as being either anatomical or functional (with little additional detail), when in fact both were functional; and second, in a putatively separate experiment, we informed participants we were able to observe their thoughts, and after a more thorough description, carried out three more functional scans, one of which was again described as anatomical. Our results demonstrate there are systematic differences across several networks as a function of instructional differences. Most strikingly, there was a significant increase in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) when comparing the first functional scan to the first sham anatomical scan, and a substantial increase in functional connectivity within the DMN when comparing the second sham anatomical scan to the second and third functional scans. These results suggest the mere awareness that one is being watched causes significant changes in the patterns of activity across functional networks, including the DMN. They also suggest the importance of using precise instructions in resting-state studies, because even slight variations in instruction can have substantial impacts on the brain's activity at rest.

The quality of a nation's healthcare system depends heavily on physicians. Particularly in the U.S., a significant portion of a physician's job involves balancing among three often competing interests: their own financial self-interest, patients' economic or health interests, and the interests of the payers representing the larger healthcare system. Physician choices in the face of these tradeoffs depend on physicians’ underlying social preferences regarding factors including altruism and efficiency, on which previous literature has provided little direct insight.

We measure the social preferences of a sample of 503 medical students from schools around the U.S. using an experimental approach. The approach allows us to decompose social preferences into two qualitatively different tradeoffs: the tradeoff between self-interest and other’s benefit (altruism), and the tradeoff between equality and efficiency. The experimental design consists of a set of computer-based revealed preference decision problems, which ask the experimental subjects to allocate real money between themselves and an anonymous person. We also collect rich individual-level information for the same sample from a survey we fielded. We examine heterogeneity in social preferences of medical students by expected specialty choice, with particular emphasis on specialty choice. Large variation in income and practice patterns across specialties in the U.S. means that in certain specialties, less altruistic behavior of physicians can yield significant financial gains, and less regard for efficiency can potentially lead to excessive waste.

We find substantial heterogeneity in altruistic preferences among experimental subjects. Medical students with a lower degree of altruism are significantly more likely to choose high-income specialties: the half of the sample who are less altruistic in the experiment chooses specialties that earn on average around $40,000 more annually than their more altruistic peers. This altruism measure is more predictive of specialty than a wide range of other characteristics, including parental income, student loan amount and Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) score. We also find that this altruism measure predicts students' self-reported likelihood of practicing medicine in an underserved area.