EXECUTIVE SUMMARY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . i

This paper examines the diagnosis related group-level (DRG) price effects of recent hospital mergers and acquisitions that occurred in Ohio and California. Empirical results indicate that hospital mergers and acquisitions increase prices at the DRG level. Further, price increases are greater in DRGs where the merging hospitals gained substantial market share compared to DRGs where the merging h...

During the last decade, biogerontologists have labored to understand the biological basis of the aging process by studying the genes and signaling pathways that regulate it. But the last year has seen a breakthrough in a different direction: toward treatments that might slow aging by mimicking the effects of dietary restriction.

Humans consistently make predictions about the valence of future events and use feedback to validate initial predictions. While the valence of outcomes provides utilitarian information, the accuracy of predictions is crucial for future performance adjustment. The feedback related negativity (FRN), identified as a marker of reward prediction error, possibly encodes social rejection and social pr...

It is widely believed that negative information is psychologically more meaningful than positive information, a phenomenon known generally as the negativity bias. However, findings concerning the possibility of a negativity bias in emotional picture processing have been mixed, with recent studies indicating the lack of such a bias in event-related brain potentials (ERPs) when pleasant and unple...

For decades researchers have used mirrors to study self-recognition. However, attempts to identify neural processes underlying this ability have used photographs instead. Here we used event related potentials (ERPs) to compare self-face recognition in photographs versus mirrors and found distinct neural signatures. Measures of visual self-recognition are therefore not independent of the medium ...

Aging is usually accompanied by alterations of cognitive control functions such as conflict processing. Recent research suggests that aging effects on cognitive control seem to vary with degree and source of conflict, and conflict specific aging effects on performance measures as well as neural activation patterns have been shown. However, there is sparse information whether and how aging affec...

We combined event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and behavioral measures to test whether subliminal visual stimuli can capture attention in a goal-dependent manner. Participants searched for visual targets defined by a specific color. Search displays served as metacontrast masks for preceding cue displays that contained one cue in the target color. Although this target-color cue was spatially ...