Time preference and personal value: a population-based cross-sectional study in Japan

Association between children's caregivers time preferences and childhood overweight and obesity in Mexico

BACKGROUND

Parents or children's primary caregivers are a key influence on child weight as both decision makers and role models for eating patterns, physical activity, and other social behaviors. It is unknown whether caregivers' time preferences are associated with overweight or obesity in children. The primary objective was to estimate the association between parents' or caregivers' time preferences and children having overweight or obesity in Mexico.

METHODS

A cross-sectional study was conducted using a representative survey of the Mexican population. A multinomial logistic model was used to examine the association between parents' or caregivers' time preferences (patience and time consistency) and child overweight or obesity, adjusting for potential confounders.

RESULTS

The study included 9,102 children (mean age 10, 43% female) and 5,842 caregivers (mean age 37; 95% female). Intertemporal preference was strongly associated with increased odds of overweight or obesity in children. A medium patient caregiver had higher odds of having overweight (adjusted OR: 1.73; 95% CI: 1.19, 2.52). Similarly, having a caregiver with a present (OR: 2.52; 95% CI: 1.72, 3.70) or future bias (OR: 1.48; 95% CI: 1.11, 1.98) was associated with higher odds of obesity.

CONCLUSION

Caregivers' time preferences were associated with having overweight and obesity in children and should be considered when developing policies to reduce children's obesity status.

Willingness to Pay and Time Trade-off in Thai Patients with Port-Wine Stains

Background

Port-wine stains are congenital vascular abnormalities that impact children’s and parents’ quality of life (QoL). There are currently no established criteria for assessing the quality of life in PWS patients. Utility measures such as willingness-to-pay (WTP) and time trade-off (TTO) can be used to quantify disease burden, impact on QoL, and assess the cost-effectiveness of interventions.

Methods

This was a cross-sectional questionnaire-based survey study in Thailand from July 2021 to April 2022. The questionnaire included sociodemographic data and preference-based measurement, WTP and TTO. The primary outcome was a WTP and TTO for PWS laser treatment. The subsample analysis for the primary outcome was based on gender (male and female) and age (<5 years and ≥5 years). The household income was measured for time trade-off outcome.

Results

Out of 46 respondents, WTP for the base case at 40% improvement cost 6109.01 baht per visit. Patients were willing to spend their time 9.95 hours per visit for a clinical improvement of 40%. Female was willing to pay and spend more time than male, while those aged≥5 years were willing to pay and spend more time than those aged <5 years. High household income >100k per month willing to spend less time than lower income groups.

Conclusion

There were obvious correlations between WTP and TTO with clinical outcomes. Utility indicators such as WTP and TTO can be used to measure disease burden, impact on QoL, and assess the cost-effectiveness of interventions. WTP and TTO could provide a more personalized approach to improving QoL, considering each patient’s unique treatment plan and priority. This could help with patient uncertainty and long-term planning strategies to increase the QoL cost-effectively.

Personalized values in life as point of interaction with the world: Developmental/neurobehavioral basis and implications for psychiatry

Behavioral neuroscience has dealt with short-term decision making but has not defined either daily or longer-term life actions. The individual brain interacts with the society/world, but where that point of action is and how it interacts has never been an explicit scientific question. Here, we redefine value as an intrapersonal driver of medium- and long-term life actions. Value has the following three aspects. The first is value as a driving force of action, a factor that commits people to take default-mode or intrinsic actions daily and longer term. It consists of value memories based on past experiences, and a sense of values, the source of choosing actions under uncertain circumstances. It is also a multilayered structure of unconscious/automatic and conscious/self-controlled. The second is personalized value, which focuses not only on the value of human beings in general, but on the aspect that is individualized and personalized, which is the foundation of diversity in society. Third, the value is developed through the life course. It is necessary to clarify how values are personalized through the internalization of parent-child, peer, and social experiences through adolescence, a life stage almost neglected in neuroscience. This viewpoint describes the brain and the behavioral basis of adolescence in which the value and its personalization occur, and the importance of this personalized value as a point of interaction between the individual brain and the world. Then the significance of personalized values in psychiatry is discussed, and the concept of values-informed psychiatry is proposed.