Mind training, stress and behaviour—A randomised experiment

Yonas Alem; Hannah Behrendt; Michèle Belot; Anikó Bíró

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0258172

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionJune 22, 2021
30 Jul 2021 Decision Letter - Pablo Brañas-Garza, Editor PONE-D-21-20053 Mind Training, Stress and Behaviour - a Randomised Experiment PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Belot, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. As you will see both reports are fairly positive. The only concern is whether the lack of results is due to the sample size. I feel that the author need to discuss the impact of the sample size (or the necessary sample size to have power) on the results. I am not asking for more data. Please submit your revised manuscript by Sep 09 2021 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. 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If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice. When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements. 1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf 2. We note that the grant information you provided in the ‘Funding Information’ and ‘Financial Disclosure’ sections do not match. When you resubmit, please ensure that you provide the correct grant numbers for the awards you received for your study in the ‘Funding Information’ section. 3. We note that you have stated that you will provide repository information for your data at acceptance. Should your manuscript be accepted for publication, we will hold it until you provide the relevant accession numbers or DOIs necessary to access your data. If you wish to make changes to your Data Availability statement, please describe these changes in your cover letter and we will update your Data Availability statement to reflect the information you provide. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 5. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: This is an interesting study. I like it that the authors have measured stress in different ways and thus replicated prior results with a non-self selected sample. My only concern is whether the lack of results in the decision-amking tasks is related to the sample size. I would like the authors to discuss what effect sizes their sample are powered to detect. Reviewer #2: I liked the paper very much. Its clear and very well executed. As authors know they have a very reduced sample but, on the other hand this is a novel idea. - Table 2: I feel that is better to say "risk taking" rather than "# boxes collected (BRET)" --> Compare Table 2 and 4 - perhaps the number of table might be reduced (some of the might be merged) Additional references to consider: - On time preferences: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/103660/ ****** 6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review?** For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: No [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0258172.r001
Revision 1
3 Sep 2021 Author Response Below we provide an answer to the queries. To facilitate reading, we copied and pasted the original comments by reviewers. We are very grateful for the comments that have helped improving the paper. Comments to the Author 1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes 3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes 4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes 5. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: This is an interesting study. I like it that the authors have measured stress in different ways and thus replicated prior results with a non-self selected sample. My only concern is whether the lack of results in the decision-making tasks is related to the sample size. I would like the authors to discuss what effect sizes their sample are powered to detect. Response from the authors: Thank you for your positive view on the paper. Your point about lack of power is well taken. Power calculations were not common at the time we conducted the experiment, and our understanding is that ex-post power calculations are problematic (see for example this discussion on a World Bank Blog:https://blogs.worldbank.org/impactevaluations/why-ex-post-power-using-estimated-effect-sizes-bad-ex-post-mde-not). In our view, it may make sense to perform power calculations for analyses of outcomes that have been previously studied in the literature. For risk, we can base our calculations on the study of Crosetto & Filippin (2013). In their static version of the game, they report a mean of 46.5 boxes collected and a standard deviation of 15.1. With this mean and standard deviation, we were powered to detect an effect size of 15% (going from 46 to 53 boxes) with power 0.80 and significance at 5%. For the estimates of impatience and present bias, it is harder to find studies that match exactly out outcome variables (other studies have different incentives, so we cannot assume that they provide good estimates of the fraction of present biased individuals, and the discount rates we estimate are also specific to the timelines we used.) So for these variables, we would be reluctant to present ex-post power calculations. We have chosen to acknowledge more explicitly the possibility that the lack of significant results may be due to small sample size. Reviewer #2: I liked the paper very much. Its clear and very well executed. As authors know they have a very reduced sample but, on the other hand this is a novel idea. - Table 2: I feel that is better to say "risk taking" rather than "# boxes collected (BRET)" --> Compare Table 2 and 4 - perhaps the number of table might be reduced (some of the might be merged) Response from authors: Response from authors: Thank you your positive assessment! We agree and we have implemented your suggestions. We have merged Tables 8 and 9 from the previous version. Additional references to consider: - On time preferences: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/103660/ Response from authors: This is an interesting paper but since we are not using hypothetical questions, we are not too sure where to fit the reference in. Also, the reference list is on the long side already, so we are reluctant to make it even longer. 6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: No Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to reviewers 3 MB.pdf https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0258172.r002
21 Sep 2021 Decision Letter - Pablo Brañas-Garza, Editor Mind Training, Stress and Behaviour - a Randomised Experiment PONE-D-21-20053R1 Dear Dr. Belot, We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements. Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication. An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. Kind regards, Pablo Brañas-Garza, PhD Economics Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation. Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed ******** 2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 6. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: I am satisfied with the authors' responses to my comments. I congratulate the authors on their nice work. Reviewer #2: (No Response) ****** 7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review?** For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: No https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0258172.r003
Formally Accepted
21 Oct 2021 Acceptance Letter - Pablo Brañas-Garza, Editor PONE-D-21-20053R1 Mind Training, Stress and Behaviour - a Randomised Experiment Dear Dr. Belot: I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact onepress@plos.org. If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Dr Pablo Brañas-Garza Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0258172.r004

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