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Explanations for human behaviour can be framed in many different ways, from the social-structural context to the individual motivation down to the neurobiological implementation. We know comparatively little about how people interpret these explanatory framings, and what they infer when one kind of explanation rather than another is made salient. In four experiments, UK general-population volunteers read vignettes describing the same behaviour, but providing explanations framed in different ways. In Study 1, we found that participants grouped explanations into ‘biological’, ‘psychological’ and ‘sociocultural’ clusters. Explanations with different framings were often seen as incompatible with one another, especially when one belonged to the ‘biological’ cluster and the other did not. In Study 2, we found that exposure to a particular explanatory framing triggered inferences beyond the information given. Specifically, psychological explanations led participants to assume the behaviour was malleable, and biological framings led them to assume it was not. In Studies 3A and 3B, we found that the choice of explanatory framing can affect people’s assumptions about effective interventions. For example, presenting a biological explanation increased people’s conviction that interventions like drugs would be effective, and decreased their conviction that psychological or socio-political interventions would be effective. These results illuminate the intuitive psychology of explanations, and also potential pitfalls in scientific communication. Framing an explanation in a particular way will often generate inferences in the audience—about what other factors are not causally important, how easy it is to change the behaviour, and what kinds of remedies are worth considering—that the communicator may not have anticipated and might not intend.

Background: Predominant explanations of the victim-offender overlap tend to focus on shared causes, such as (low) self-control or risky lifestyles. Such explanations bypass the possibility of a causal link between victimization and offending. We draw on evolutionary developmental psychology and criminological research to propose and test the hypothesis that victimization induces what we refer to as a short-term mindset, i.e., an orientation towards the here-and-now at the expense of considering the future, which in turn increases offending. Methods: We test this mediation hypothesis using structural equation modeling of longitudinal data from a representative sample of urban youth from the city of Zurich, Switzerland (N = 1675). Results: In line with our preregistered predictions, we find that short-term mindsets mediate the effect of victimization on offending, net of prior levels of offending and short-term mindsets, and other controls. Conclusions: We discuss implications for criminological theory and interventions.

Here we introduce a Special Section of Child Development entitled “Formalizing Theories of Child Development.” This Special Section features five papers that use mathematical models to advance our understanding of central questions in the study of child development. This landmark collection is timely: it signifies growing awareness that rigorous empirical bricks are not enough; we need solid theory to build the house. By stating theory in mathematical terms, formal models make concepts, assumptions, and reasoning more explicit than verbal theory does. This increases falsifiability, promotes cumulative science, and enables integration with mathematical theory in allied disciplines. The Special Section contributions cover a range of topics: the developmental origins of counting, interactions between mathematics and language development, visual exploration and word learning in infancy, referent identification by toddlers, and the emergence of typical and atypical development. All are written in an accessible manner and for a broad audience.

Childhood adversity can have wide-ranging and long-lasting effects on later life. But what are the mechanisms that are responsible for these effects? This article brings together the cognitive science literature on explore–exploit tradeoffs, the empirical literature on early adversity, and the literature in evolutionary biology on ‘life history’ to explain how early experience influences later life. We propose one potential mechanism: early experiences influence ‘hyperparameters’ that determine the balance between exploration and exploitation. Adversity might ac- celerate a shift from exploration to exploitation, with broad and enduring effects on the adult brain and mind. These effects may be produced by life-history adap- tations that use early experience to tailor development and learning to the likely future states of an organism and its environment.

There is massive variation in rates of violence across time and space. These rates are positively associated with economic deprivation and inequality. They also tend to display a degree of local persistence, or ‘enduring neighbourhood effects’. Here, we identify a single mechanism that can produce all three observations. We formalize it in a mathematical model, which specifies how individual-level processes generate the population-level patterns. Our model assumes that agents try to keep their level of resources above a ‘desperation threshold’, to reflect the intuitive notion that one of people’s priorities is to always meet their basic needs. As shown in previous work, being below the threshold makes risky actions, such as property crime, beneficial. We simulate populations with heterogeneous levels of resources. When deprivation or inequality is high, there are more desperate individuals, hence a higher risk of exploitation. It then becomes advantageous to use violence, to send a ‘toughness signal’ to exploiters. For intermediate levels of poverty, the system is bistable and we observe hysteresis: populations can be violent because they were deprived or unequal in the past, even after conditions improve. We discuss implications of our findings for policy and interventions aimed at reducing violence.

Radboud University, 01 maart 2023, Promotor : Cillessen, A.H.N. Co-promotores : Frankenhuis, W.E., Figner, B., Contains fulltext : 289682.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access)

A growing body of literature suggests that adverse environments can produce a larger spectrum of outcomes than suggested by the traditional deficit approach. The present study investigated experiences of resource-scarce and neglectful environments, two aspects of deprivation, as predictors for temporal discounting in the decision-making of youth. Informed by the contextually appropriate response perspective (CARP), unpredictability schemas were investigated as a mediator between adverse experiences and temporal discounting. Regression and mediation analyses were conducted on questionnaire data of 534 youth from a middle school and five after-school clubs in Salt Lake City, USA. The 49% female sample had a mean age of 13.6 (range 12-18), it was socioeconomically and ethnically diverse but predominantly White and Hispanic. Results indicated evidence for childhood neglect and resource scarcity as predictors of unpredictability schemas. While childhood neglect predicted the use of temporal discounting, resource scarcity did not. There was no evidence for an unpredictability schema as a mediator, which was not aligned with predictions based on the CARP. Direct implications for the CARP are minor. Future studies should utilize the potential of the perspective and add to the evidence so that more impactful conclusions can be drawn. Several strengths, limitations, and recommendations for future research on the CARP are discussed. Investigating adversity exposure from multiple viewpoints is essential to find an adequate balance of impairment, strengths, and rationality in our view of adversity-exposed youth. Finding mechanisms of environmental adaptation is crucial to building policies and interventions that reduce socioeconomic gradients in adaptive developmental outcomes.

Exposure to harsh or unpredictable environments can impair social and cognitive functioning. However, people may also develop enhanced abilities for solving challenges relevant in those environments (‘hidden talents’). In the current study, we explored the associations between people’s ability to accurately forecast conflict outcomes and their past and current experiences with violence. To do so, we used dynamic, real-world videos with known outcomes, rather than static, artificial stimuli (e.g., vignettes) with unknown outcomes, as previous research has done. We conducted a preregistered study in the Netherlands that included a final sample of 127 participants: 63 from a community sample and 64 college students. We found no support for our core hypothesis that people who experienced more violence are more accurate in forecasting conflict outcomes. Thus, we did not find support for hidden talents, contributing to an evidence base that was already mixed and inconclusive. We did find support for our auxiliary hypothesis that college students would wear ‘rose-colored glasses’, underestimating the number of conflicts that would escalate into fights. Contrary to our other two auxiliary hypotheses, the community sample did not overestimate the number of conflicts that would escalate into fights, and people who have experienced more violence were not more likely to predict that conflicts will escalate into fights. These findings have implications for the literature on hostile attribution bias, which shows that people with more exposure to violence more likely interpret the ambiguous actions of others as hostile. Whereas this pattern is often attributed to negativity bias in people with more exposure to violence, it might also reflect rose-colored glasses on people living safer lives.

Verslag co-creatie UU x Young in Prison 10-2020 - 04-2021

Sensitive periods, during which the impact of experience on phenotype is larger than in other periods, exist in all classes of organisms, yet little is known about their evolution. Recent mathematical modelling has explored the conditions in which natural selection favours sensitive periods. These models have assumed that the environment is stable across ontogeny or that organisms can develop phenotypes instantaneously at any age. Neither assumption generally holds. Here, we present a model in which organisms gradually tailor their phenotypes to an environment that fluctuates across ontogeny, while receiving cost-free, imperfect cues to the current environmental state. We vary the rate of environmental change, the reliability of cues and the duration of adulthood relative to ontogeny. We use stochastic dynamic programming to compute optimal policies. From these policies, we simulate levels of plasticity across ontogeny and obtain mature phenotypes. Our results show that sensitive periods can occur at the onset, midway through and even towards the end of ontogeny. In contrast with models assuming stable environments, organisms always retain residual plasticity late in ontogeny. We conclude that critical periods, after which plasticity is zero, are unlikely to be favoured in environments that fluctuate across ontogeny.

Sensitive periods are widespread in nature, but their evolution is not well understood. Recent mathematical modeling has illuminated the conditions favoring the evolution of sensitive periods early in ontogeny. However, sensitive periods also exist at later stages of ontogeny, such as adolescence. Here, we present a mathematical model that explores the conditions that favor sensitive periods at later developmental stages. In our model, organisms use environmental cues to incrementally construct a phenotype that matches their environment. Unlike in previous models, the reliability of cues varies across ontogeny. We use stochastic dynamic programming to compute optimal policies for a range of evolutionary ecologies and then simulate developmental trajectories to obtain mature phenotypes. We measure changes in plasticity across ontogeny using study paradigms inspired by empirical research: adoption and cross-fostering. Our results show that sensitive periods only evolve later in ontogeny if the reliability of cues increases across ontogeny. The onset, duration, and offset of sensitive periods—and the magnitude of plasticity—depend on the specific parameter settings. If the reliability of cues decreases across ontogeny, sensitive periods are favored only early in ontogeny. These results are robust across different paradigms suggesting that empirical findings might be comparable despite different experimental designs.

Item does not contain fulltext, Although early-life adversity can undermine healthy development, children growing up in harsh environments may develop intact, or even enhanced, skills for solving problems in high-adversity contexts (i.e., "hidden talents"). Here we situate the hidden talents model within a larger interdisciplinary framework. Summarizing theory and research on hidden talents, we propose that stress-adapted skills represent a form of adaptive intelligence that enables individuals to function within the constraints of harsh, unpredictable environments. We discuss the alignment of the hidden talents model with current knowledge about human brain development following early adversity; examine potential applications of this perspective to multiple sectors concerned with youth from harsh environments, including education, social services, and juvenile justice; and compare the hidden talents model with contemporary developmental resilience models. We conclude that the hidden talents approach offers exciting new directions for research on developmental adaptations to childhood adversity, with translational implications for leveraging stress-adapted skills to more effectively tailor education, jobs, and interventions to fit the needs and potentials of individuals from a diverse range of life circumstances. This approach affords a well-rounded view of people who live with adversity that avoids stigma and communicates a novel, distinctive, and strength-based message.

Item does not contain fulltext, Sensitive periods, during which the impact of experience on phenotype is larger than in other periods, exist in all classes of organisms, yet little is known about their evolution. Recent mathematical modelling has explored the conditions in which natural selection favours sensitive periods. These models have assumed that the environment is stable across ontogeny or that organisms can develop phenotypes instantaneously at any age. Neither assumption generally holds. Here, we present a model in which organisms gradually tailor their phenotypes to an environment that fluctuates across ontogeny, while receiving cost-free, imperfect cues to the current environmental state. We vary the rate of environmental change, the reliability of cues and the duration of adulthood relative to ontogeny. We use stochastic dynamic programming to compute optimal policies. From these policies, we simulate levels of plasticity across ontogeny and obtain mature phenotypes. Our results show that sensitive periods can occur at the onset, midway through and even towards the end of ontogeny. In contrast with models assuming stable environments, organisms always retain residual plasticity late in ontogeny. We conclude that critical periods, after which plasticity is zero, are unlikely to be favoured in environments that fluctuate across ontogeny.

Item does not contain fulltext, Are impulsive behaviors an adaptive response to living in harsh or unpredictable environments? Formal models help address this question by providing cost-benefit analyses across a broad range of environmental conditions, but their various results have not been systematically integrated. Here, we survey models from diverse disciplines including psychology, biology, economics, and management to develop a conceptual framework of impulsivity. Using this framework, we integrated results from 30 models to review whether impulsivity is adaptive across a range of environmental conditions. We focus on information impulsivity, that is, acting without considering consequences, and temporal impulsivity, that is, the tendency to pick sooner outcomes over later ones. Results show that both types are adaptive when individuals are close to a critical threshold (e.g., bankruptcy), resources are predictable, or interruptions are common. When resources are scarce, impulsivity can be adaptive or maladaptive, depending on the type and degree of scarcity. Information impulsivity is also adaptive when environments do not change over time or change very often (but maladaptive in between), or if local resource patches have similar properties, reducing the need to gather further information. Temporal impulsivity is adaptive when environments do not change over time and when local resource patches differ. Our review shows theoreticians how ideas from different disciplines are connected, affords formal modelers to see similarities and differences between their own models and those of others, and informs researchers about which empirical predictions generalize across a broad range of environmental conditions and which ones do not. To end, we provide concrete recommendations for future empirical studies.

Radboud University, 12 september 2022, Promotor : Cillessen, A.H.N. Co-promotores : Frankenhuis, W.E., Panchanathan, K., Contains fulltext : 253383.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access)