The concept of sentience concerns the capacity to have feelings. There is evidence for sophisticated cognitive concepts and for both positive and negative feelings in a wide range of nonhuman animals. All vertebrates, including fish, as well as some molluscs and decapod crustaceans have pain systems. Most people today consider that their moral obligations extend to many animal species. Moral de...

Feelings-as-information theory conceptualizes the role of subjective experiences – including moods, emotions, metacognitive experiences, and bodily sensations – in judgment. It assumes that people attend to their feelings as a source of information, with different feelings providing different types of information. Whereas feelings elicited by the target of judgment provide valid information, fe...

I consider a general model of decisionmaking where anticipatory feelings enter the agent's utility function in addition to physical outcomes, and allow for interactions between these two payo components. I use an equilibrium concept, personal equilibrium, that combines best response to other selves' strategies with rational expectations in the formation of feelings. A decisionmaker with feeling...

Studies of patients going into diabetes remission after gastric bypass surgery have demonstrated the important role of the gut in glucose control. The improvement of type 2 diabetes after gastric bypass surgery occurs via weight dependent and weight independent mechanisms. The rapid improvement of glucose levels within days after the surgery, in relation to change of meal pattern, rapid nutrien...

Cross-linguistic differences in emotionality of autobiographical memories were examined by eliciting memories of immigration from bilingual speakers. Forty-seven Russian-English bilinguals were asked to recount their immigration experiences in either Russian or English. Bilinguals used more emotion words when describing their immigration experiences in the second language (English) than in the ...

The perspective that eating and obesity are linked to depressive disorders has gained considerable purchase, in part, because of the attention devoted to obesity in general, the finding that obesity is accompanied by a 25% increase of anxiety and depressive disorders, and because of reports linking obesity and depression to heart disease1 as well as other conditions that involve inflammatory fa...

Background Non-inferiority (NI) trials test a hypothesis that a new treatment is inferior to standard treatment only to a negligible degree. Bio-creep basically refers to the cyclical phenomenon where a slightly inferior treatment becomes the active control for the next generation of NI trials which over time leads to degradation of the efficacy of the investigational treatment [1,2]. We studie...