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This prospective longitudinal study provides evidence of preschool-age precursors of hostile attribution bias in young school-age children, a topic that has received little empirical attention. We examined multiple risk domains, including laboratory and observational assessments of children's social-cognition, general cognitive functioning, effortful control, and peer aggression. Preschoolers (N = 231) with a more advanced theory-of-mind, better emotion understanding, and higher IQ made fewer hostile attributions of intent in the early school years. Further exploration of these significant predictors revealed that only certain components of these capacities (i.e., nonstereotypical emotion understanding, false-belief explanation, and verbal IQ) were robust predictors of a hostile attribution bias in young school-age children and were especially strong predictors among children with more advanced effortful control. These relations were prospective in nature-the effects of preschool variables persisted after accounting for similar variables at school age. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for future research and prevention.

For centuries, humans have contemplated the minds of gods. Research on religious cognition is spread across sub-disciplines, making it difficult to gain a complete understanding of how people reason about gods' minds. We integrate approaches from cognitive, developmental, and social psychology and neuroscience to illuminate the origins of religious cognition. First, we show that although adults explicitly discriminate supernatural minds from human minds, their implicit responses reveal far less discrimination. Next, we demonstrate that children's religious cognition often matches adults' implicit responses, revealing anthropomorphic notions of God's mind. Together, data from children and adults suggest the intuitive nature of perceiving God's mind as human-like. We then propose three complementary explanations for why anthropomorphism persists in adulthood, suggesting that anthropomorphism may be (a) an instance of the anchoring and adjustment heuristic; (b) a reflection of early testimony; and/or (c) an evolutionary byproduct.

Despite the ubiquitous use of anthropomorphic language to describe biological change in both educational settings and popular science, little is known about how anthropomorphic language influences children's understanding of evolutionary concepts. In an experimental study, we assessed whether the language used to convey evolutionary concepts influences children's (5- to 12-year-olds; N = 88) understanding of evolutionary change. Language was manipulated by using three types of narrative, each describing animals' biological change: (a) need-based narratives, which referenced animals' basic survival needs; (b) desire-based or anthropomorphic narratives, which referenced animals' mental states; and (c) scientifically accurate natural selection narratives. Results indicate that the language used to describe evolutionary change influenced children's endorsement of and use of evolutionary concepts when interpreting that change. Narratives using anthropomorphic language were least likely to facilitate a scientifically accurate interpretation. In contrast, need-based and natural selection language had similar and positive effects, which suggests that need-based reasoning might provide a conceptual scaffold to an evolutionary explanation of biological origins. In sum, the language used to teach evolutionary change impacts conceptual understanding in children and has important pedagogical implications for science education. (Contains 1 table and 1 figure.)

How and when do children develop an understanding of extraordinary mental capacities? The current study tested 56 preschoolers on false-belief and knowledge-ignorance tasks about the mental states of contrasting agents--some agents were ordinary humans, some had exceptional perceptual capacities, and others possessed extraordinary mental capacities. Results indicated that, in contrast to younger and older peers, children within a specific age range reliably attributed fallible, human-like capacities to ordinary humans and to several special agents (including God) for both tasks. These data lend critical support to an anthropomorphism hypothesis--which holds that children's understanding of extraordinary minds is derived from their everyday intuitive psychology--and reconcile disparities between the findings of other studies on children's understanding of extraordinary minds.

Evidence of perpetrators' biological or situational circumstances has been increasingly brought to bear in courtrooms. Yet, research findings are mixed as to whether this information influences folk evaluations of perpetrators' dispositions, and subsequently, evaluations of their deserved punishments. Previous research has not clearly dissociated the effects of information about perpetrators' genetic endowment versus their environmental circumstances. Additionally, most research has focused exclusively on violations involving extreme physical harm, often using mock capital sentences cases as examples. To address these gaps in the literature, we employed a "switched-at-birth" paradigm to investigate whether positive or negative information about perpetrators' genetic or environmental backgrounds influence evaluations of a perpetrator's mental states, character, and deserved punishment. Across three studies, we varied whether the transgression involved direct harm, an impure act that caused no harm, or a case of moral luck. The results indicate that negative genetic and environmental backgrounds influenced participants' evaluations of perpetrators' intentions, free will, and character, but did not influence participants' punishment decisions. Overall, these results replicate and extend existing findings suggesting that perpetrators' supposed extenuating circumstances may not mitigate the punishment that others assign to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For centuries, humans have contemplated the minds of gods. Research on religious cognition is spread across sub-disciplines, making it difficult to gain a complete understanding of how people reason about gods' minds. We integrate approaches from cognitive, developmental, and social psychology and neuroscience to illuminate the origins of religious cognition. First, we show that although adults explicitly discriminate supernatural minds from human minds, their implicit responses reveal far less discrimination. Next, we demonstrate that children's religious cognition often matches adults' implicit responses, revealing anthropomorphic notions of God's mind. Together, data from children and adults suggest the intuitive nature of perceiving God's mind as human-like. We then propose three complementary explanations for why anthropomorphism persists in adulthood, suggesting that anthropomorphism may be (a) an instance of the anchoring and adjustment heuristic; (b) a reflection of early testimony; and/or (c) an evolutionary byproduct. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary research, often with looking-time tasks, reveals that infants possess foundational understandings of their social worlds. However, few studies have examined how these early social cognitions relate to the child's social interactions and behavior in early development. Does an early understanding of the social world relate to how an infant interacts with his or her parents? Do early social interactions along with social-cognitive understandings in infancy predict later preschool social competencies? In the current paper, we propose a theory in which children's later social behaviors and their understanding of the social world depend on the integration of early social understanding and experiences in infancy. We review several of our studies, as well as other research, that directly examine the pathways between these competencies to support a hypothesized network of relations between social-cognitive development and social-interactive behaviors in the development from infancy to childhood. In total, these findings reveal differences in infant social competences that both track the developmental trajectory of infants' understanding of people over the first years of life and provide external validation for the large body of social-cognitive findings emerging from laboratory looking-time paradigms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To identify the major outer surface proteins of Streptococcus agalactiae (group B streptococcus), a proteomic analysis was undertaken. An extract of the outer surface proteins was separated by two-dimensional electrophoresis. The visualized spots were identified through a combination of peptide sequencing and reverse genetic methodologies. Of the 30 major spots identified as S. agalactiae specific, 27 have been identified. Six of these proteins, previously unidentified in S. agalactiae, were sequenced and cloned. These were ornithine carbamoyltransferase, phosphoglycerate kinase, nonphosphorylating glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase, purine nucleoside phosphorylase, enolase, and glucose-6-phosphate isomerase. Using a gram-positive expression system, we have overexpressed two of these proteins in an in vitro system. These recombinant, purified proteins were used to raise antisera. The identification of these proteins as residing on the outer surface was confirmed by the ability of the antisera to react against whole, live bacteria. Further, in a neonatal-animal model system, we demonstrate that some of these sera are protective against lethal doses of bacteria. These studies demonstrate the successful application of proteomics as a technique for identifying vaccine candidates.