Many decisions are curated, incentivised or nudged by a third party. Despite this, only a handful of studies have looked at paternalistic decision-makers and the psychological processes by which they arrive at their decisions. The role of affect, in particular, has been ignored so far, and yet restricting agency on a potentially large group of people might be highly unpleasant. We are the first to propose a conceptual framework of affective paternalism which explicitly accounts for the role of affect in paternalistic decision-making, identifying all entry points through which affect may create systematic deviations in decision outcomes. We shed light on some of these phenomena by using a novel survey experiment in which we let participants make paternalistic decisions whilst also asking them about their motivations behind their choices, including cognitive reasons and affect. Our findings suggest that affect may play a significant role in paternalistic decision-making and lead to systematically different decision outcomes. To the extent that these that could result in inefficient, undesirable or unfair consequences, our framework may help more accurately predict a paternalist's decision and suggest entry points for where and possibly how to intervene in the paternalistic decision-making process.

Although there has been a proliferation of research and policy work into how nudges shape people's behaviour, most studies stop far short of consumer welfare analysis. In the current work, we critically reflect on recent efforts to provide insights into the consumer welfare impact of nudges using willingness to pay and subjective well-being reports and explore an unobtrusive approach that can speak to the immediate emotional impacts of a nudge: automatic facial expression coding. In an exploratory lab study, we use facial expression coding to assess the short-run emotional impact of being presented with calorie information about a popcorn snack in the context of a stylised ‘Cinema experience’. The results of the study indicate that calorie information has heterogeneous impacts on people's likelihood of choosing the snack and on the emotions they experience during the moment of choice which varies based on their level of health-consciousness. The information does not, however, affect the emotions people go on to experience while viewing movie clips, suggesting that the emotional effects of the information are short-lived. We conclude by emphasising the potential of automatic facial expression coding to provide new insights into the immediate emotional impacts of nudges and calling for further research into this promising technique.

Air pollution makes us feel bad when we think about it – but do bad air days really affect our subjective well-being (SWB) when we are not thinking about them? And if so, do they affect the range of possible measures of SWB in similar ways? Using data from over 165,000 individuals in the UK, we model evaluative, experiential and eudemonic SWB as a function of demographic and local area characteristics including the background concentration of particulate matter. Our results indicate that air pollution adversely affects all of the positive measure of SWB included in our analysis; how satisfied people report being with their lives overall, how happy they report feeling on the previous day and how worthwhile they rate their activities as being, and that it does so over and above its effects on self-reported health. These effects can be monetized and may imply greater priority being afforded to pollution abatement programs than is currently warranted based on existing estimates of the health effects alone.

The Netherlands Twin Register (NTR) began in 1987 with data collection in twins and their families, including families with newborn twins and triplets. Twenty-five years later, the NTR has collected at least one survey for 70,784 children, born after 1985. For the majority of twins, longitudinal data collection has been done by age-specific surveys. Shortly after giving birth, mothers receive a first survey with items on pregnancy and birth. At age 2, a survey on growth and achievement of milestones is sent. At ages 3, 7, 9/10, and 12 parents and teachers receive a series of surveys that are targeted at the development of emotional and behavior problems. From age 14 years onward, adolescent twins and their siblings report on their behavior problems, health, and lifestyle. When the twins are 18 years and older, parents are also invited to take part in survey studies. In sub-groups of different ages, in-depth phenotyping was done for IQ, electroencephalography , MRI, growth, hormones, neuropsychological assessments, and cardiovascular measures. DNA and biological samples have also been collected and large numbers of twin pairs and parents have been genotyped for zygosity by either micro-satellites or sets of short nucleotide polymorphisms and repeat polymorphisms in candidate genes. Subject recruitment and data collection is still ongoing and the longitudinal database is growing. Data collection by record linkage in the Netherlands is beginning and we expect these combined longitudinal data to provide increased insights into the genetic etiology of development of mental and physical health in children and adolescents.

Governments around the world are now beginning to seriously consider the use of measures of subjective wellbeing (SWB) – ratings of thoughts and feelings about life – for monitoring progress and for informing and appraising public policy. The mental state account of wellbeing upon which SWB measures are based can provide useful additional information about who is doing well and badly in life when compared to that provided by the objective list and preference satisfaction accounts. It may be particularly useful when deciding how best to allocate scarce resources, where it is desirable to express the benefits of intervention in a single metric that can be compared to the costs of intervention. There are three main concepts of SWB in the literature – evaluation (life satisfaction), experience (momentary mood) and eudemonia (purpose) – and policy-makers should seek to measure all three, at least for the purposes of monitoring progress. There are some major challenges to the use of SWB measures. Two related and well-rehearsed issues are the effects of expectations and adaptation on ratings. The degree to which we should allow wellbeing to vary according to expectations and adaptation are vexing moral problems but information on SWB can highlight what difference allowing for these considerations would have in practice (e.g. in informing prioiritisation decisions), which can then be fed into the normative debate. There are also questions about precisely what attention should be drawn to in SWB questions and how to capture the ratings of those least inclined to take part in surveys, but these can be addressed through more widespread use of SWB. We also provide some concrete recommendations about precisely what questions should be asked in large-scale surveys, and these recommendations have been taken up by the Office of National Statistics in the UK and are being looked at closely by the OECD.

Many government interventions seek to reduce the risk of death. The value of preventing a fatality (VPF) is the monetary amount associated with each statistical death that an intervention can be expected to prevent. The VPF has been estimated using a preference-based approach, either by observing market behaviour (revealed preferences) or by asking hypothetical questions that seek to replicate the market (stated preferences). The VPF has been shown to differ across and within these methods. In theory, the VPF should vary according to factors such as baseline and background risk, but, in practice, the estimates vary more by theoretically irrelevant factors, such as the starting point in stated preference studies. This variation makes it difficult to choose one unique VPF. The theoretically irrelevant factors also affect the estimates of the monetary value of a statistical life year and the value of a quality-adjusted life year. In light of such problems, it may be fruitful to focus more research efforts on generating the VPF using an approach based on the subjective well-being associated with different states of the world.

Most health economists recommend that improvements in health be valued by asking members of the general public to imagine themselves in different states of health and then to think about how many years of life they would give up or what risk of death they would be willing to accept in order to be in full health. In this paper, I argue that preferences are not a very good guide to future experiences and a more suitable way to value health is to ask people in different states of health how they think and feel about their lives. Valuing health in this way may result in greater priority being given to mental health services. Whatever the precise implications, it is my contention that it is much better to ration health care according to real experiences rather than according to hypothetical preferences.

This paper considers the question of what ought to be valued in the context of measuring the outcomes of healthcare interventions. The answer is discrete health states in the case of the quality-adjusted life-year (QALY) model and an entire health profile in the case of the healthy-years equivalent (HYE) approach. How well the weighted average of values attached to the former approximates the overall value attached to the latter depends on the validity of the assumptions of the QALY model. The paper considers some of the empirical literature relating to them. One of the most important assumptions, which from the limited evidence available appears not to hold, is additive separability. However, it is argued that violation of this assumption does not in itself invalidate the QALY approach, since in some circumstances it might be more appropriate to elicit the value of a health state independently of the states that succeed it. Investigation into this issue is identified as one of the key areas where future research efforts should be directed.

Comparative sequence analysis complements experimental methods for the determination of RNA three-dimensional structure. This approach is based on the concept that different sequences within the same gene family form similar higher-order structures. The large number of rRNA sequences with sufficient variation, along with improved covariation algorithms, are providing us with the opportunity to identify new base triples in 16S rRNA. The three-dimensional conformations for one of our strongest candidates involving U121 (C124:G237) and/or U121 (U125:A236) (Escherichia coli sequence and numbering) are analyzed here with different molecular modeling tools. Molecular modeling shows that U121 interacts with C124 in the U121 (C124:G237) base triple. This arrangement maintains isomorphic structures for the three most frequent sequence motifs (approximately 93% of known bacterial and archaeal sequences), is consistent with chemical reactivity of U121 in E. coli ribosomes, and is geometrically favorable. Further, the restricted set of observed canonical (GU, AU, GC) base-pair types at positions 124:237 and 125:236 is consistent with the fact that the canonical base-pair sets (for both base pairs) that are not observed in nature prevent the formation of the 121(124:237) base triple. The analysis described here serves as a general scheme for the prediction of specific secondary and tertiary structure base pairing where there is a network of correlated base changes.