Search

While people may be reluctant to explicitly state social stereotypes, their underlying beliefs may nonetheless leak out in subtler conversational cues, such as surprisal reactions that convey information about expectations. Across 3 experiments with adults and children (ages 4-9), we compare permissive responses ("Sure, you can have that one") that vary the presence of surprisal cues (interjections "oh!" and disfluencies "um"). In Experiment 1 (n = 120), children by 6-to-7 use surprisal reactions to infer that a boy more likely made a counter-stereotypical choice. In Experiment 2, we demonstrate that these cues are sufficient for children (n = 120) and adults (n = 80) to learn a novel expectation about a group of aliens. In Experiment 3, adults (n = 150) use the distribution of surprisal information to infer whether a novel behavior is gender-stereotyped. Across these experiments, we see emerging evidence that conversational feedback may provide a crucial and unappreciated avenue for the transmission of social beliefs.

Collaboration can make collective judgments more accurate than individual judgments, but it also comes with costs in time, effort, and social cohesion. But how do we estimate these costs? In two experiments, we introduce children and adults to two teams in which the teammates disagree about the optimal solution to a novel problem, and ask which team would need more time to reach a consensus decision. We find that all ages expect slower decisions from teams with more people or factions, and expect the number of factions to matter more than the number of people. But only adults expect decisions initially endorsed by a stronger faction to be faster than those endorsed by a weaker faction. Results are discussed in context of children’s reasoning about dominance, and models of time-rational collective decision-making.

Young children show remarkably sophisticated abilities to evaluate others. Yet their abilities to engage in proportional moral evaluation undergoes protracted development. Namely, young children evaluate someone who shares "absolutely" more as being "nicer" than someone who shares "proportionally" more (e.g., sharing 3-out-of-6 is nicer than sharing 2-out-of-3, because 3 > 2, even though 3/6 < 2/3), whereas adults think the opposite. We investigate the hypothesis that this prior work underestimates children's proportional social reasoning by relying on discrete and spatially separated quantities (e.g., individual stickers), which can hinder proportional reasoning even outside social contexts. In three experiments we examine whether 4- and 5-year-old children's social evaluations are impacted by the discreteness and spatial separation of the resource and compare their behavior to adults (18 to 63 years; across all samples: 38% girls/women, 62% boys/men; no other demographic data was collected). We find that children are sensitive to these features: when the resource was divided into discrete units (Experiment 1) or spatially separated (Experiment 2) children were more likely to use absolute amount, as opposed to proportion, relative to when the resources were not divided and remained spatially connected. However, adults were highly sensitive to proportion regardless of the display's perceptual features (Experiment 3), and children's use of proportion remained below adult-levels. These results suggest that perceptual features influence children's use of absolute versus proportional information in their social evaluations, which has theoretical and methodological implications for understanding children's conceptions of fairness.

Socially savvy individuals track what they know and what other people likely know, and they use this information to navigate the social world. We examine whether children expect people to have shared knowledge based on their social relationships (e.g., expecting friends to know each other's secrets, expecting members of the same cultural group to share cultural knowledge) and we compare children's reasoning about shared knowledge to their reasoning about common knowledge (e.g., the wrongness of moral violations). In three studies, we told 4- to 9-year-olds (N = 227) about what a child knew and asked who else knew the information: The child's friend (Studies 1-3), the child's schoolmate (Study 1), another child from the same national group (Study 2), or the child's sibling (Study 3). In all three studies, older children reliably used relationships to infer what other people knew. Moreover, with age, children increasingly considered both the type of knowledge and an individual's social relationships when reporting who knew what. The results provide support for a 'Selective Inferences' hypothesis and suggest that children's early attention to social relationships facilitates an understanding of how knowledge transfers -- an otherwise challenging cognitive process.

Condemnation is ubiquitous in the social world and adults treat condemnation as a costly signal. We explore when children begin to treat condemnation as a signal by presenting 4- to 9-year-old children (N = 435) with stories involving a condemner of stealing and a noncondemner. Children were asked to predict who would be more likely to steal as well as who should be punished more harshly for stealing. In five studies, we found that 7- to 9-year-old children treat condemnation as a signal--thinking that a condemner is less likely to steal and should be punished more harshly if caught hypocritically stealing later. We discuss the implications of these results for children's emerging understanding of signaling and moral condemnation.

Introduction Bipolar disorder is a complex psychiatric disorder with a population prevalence of approximately 1%. (1) It is typically characterized by cyclic manic or hypomanic and depressive affect. (2) Genetic [...], Background: Bipolar disorder is a highly heritable psychiatric condition for which specific genetic factors remain largely unknown. In the present study, we used combined whole-exome sequencing and linkage analysis to identify risk loci and dissect the contribution of common and rare variants in families with a high density of illness. Methods: Overall, 117 participants from 15 Australian extended families with bipolar disorder (72 with affective disorder, including 50 with bipolar disorder type I or II, 13 with schizoaffective disorder-manic type and 9 with recurrent unipolar disorder) underwent whole-exome sequencing. We performed genome-wide linkage analysis using MERLIN and conditional linkage analysis using LAMP. We assessed the contribution of potentially functional rare variants using a genebased segregation test. Results: We identified a significant linkage peak on chromosome 10q11-q21 (maximal single nucleotide polymorphism = rs10761725; exponential logarithm of the odds [LODexp] = 3.03; empirical p = 0.046). The linkage interval spanned 36 protein-coding genes, including a gene associated with bipolar disorder, ankyrin 3 (ANK3). Conditional linkage analysis showed that common ANK3 risk variants previously identified in genome-wide association studies--or variants in linkage disequilibrium with those variants--did not explain the linkage signal (rs10994397 LOD = 0.63; rs9804190 LOD = 0.04). A family-based segregation test with 34 rare variants from 14 genes under the linkage interval suggested rare variant contributions of 3 brain-expressed genes: NRBF2 (p = 0.005), PCDH15 (p = 0.002) and ANK3 (p = 0.014). Limitations: We did not examine non-coding variants, but they may explain the remaining linkage signal. Conclusion: Combining family-based linkage analysis with next-generation sequencing data is effective for identifying putative disease genes and specific risk variants in complex disorders. We identified rare missense variants in ANK3, PCDH15 and NRBF2 that could confer disease risk, providing valuable targets for functional characterization.

Successful and repeated cooperation requires fairly sharingthe spoils of joint endeavors. Fair distribution is often doneaccording to preferences for equitable outcomes even thoughstrictly equitable outcomes can lead to inefficient waste. In ad-dition to preferences about the outcome itself, decision makersare also sensitive to the attributions others might make aboutthem as a result of their choice. We develop a novel mathemat-ical model where decision makers turn their capacity to inferlatent desires and beliefs from the behavior of others (theory-of-mind) towards themselves, anticipating the judgments oth-ers will make about them. Using this model we can construct apreference to be seen as impartial and integrate it with prefer-ences for equitable and efficient outcomes. We test this modelin two studies where the anticipated attribution of impartialityis ambiguous: when one agent is more deserving than the otherand when unbiased procedures for distribution are made avail-able. This model explains both participants’ judgments aboutthe partiality of others and their hypothetical decisions. Ourmodel argues that people avoid inequity not only because theyfind it inherently undesirable, they also want to avoid beingjudged as partial.

Secrets carry valuable social information. Because the content of secrets can be damaging to the secret-keeper's reputation, people should only disclose their secrets to people whom they trust. Therefore, tracking which people know each other's secrets can be used as cue of social relationships: If one person tells another person a secret, those people are likely friends. Here, in 5 studies with 3- to 12-year-old children (total N = 452), we examined the developmental trajectory of reasoning about secret sharing as an indication of third-party friendship. By age 6, but not before, children expected that a person would be friends with someone that she told a secret. We replicated this main finding across four studies by comparing secret sharing to other cues of affiliation. Children treated sharing a secret as a stronger cue to friendship than sharing a physical object (Study 1), sharing a fact (Studies 2-4), or sharing membership on the same sports team (Study 3). Although younger children did not understand that secret sharing indicated friendship, they did expect people to be more likely to disclose their secrets to friends than to nonfriends (Study 5). Taken together, our results indicate that children understand the social significance of sharing secrets and use secret sharing to make important predictions about the social world. Specifically, children infer social relationships based on which people know each other's secrets and expect others to share secrets selectivity with friends.

Across a variety of situations, people strongly condemn plagiarizers who steal credit for ideas, even when the theft in question does not appear to harm anyone. Why would people react negatively to relatively harmless acts of plagiarism? In six experiments, we predict and find that these negative reactions are driven by people's aversion toward agents who attempt to falsely improve their reputations. In Studies 1-3, participants condemn plagiarism cases that they agree are harmless (i.e., stealing credit from an anonymous source). This effect is mediated by the extent to which participants perceive the plagiarizer to have falsely benefitted from plagiarizing. In Studies 4-5, we demonstrate that this effect is not explained solely by participants' negative response to lies or violations of permission. In Study 6, participants condemn a plagiarism case in which the idea's original author actually "benefits", providing the strongest evidence that people condemn plagiarism for reasons beyond perceived harm. We discuss how this work connects to broader questions of intellectual property and impression management.

Introduction Autism-spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by impairments in social interactions and communication, and by repetitive behaviours. Appearing in approximately 1% of the general population, ASD is one of the [...], Background: Previous research has implicated de novo and inherited truncating mutations in autism-spectrum disorder. We aim to investigate whether the load of inherited truncating mutations contributes similarly to high-functioning autism, and to characterize genes that harbour de novo variants in high-functioning autism. Methods: We performed whole-exome sequencing in 20 high- functioning autism families (average IQ = 100). Results: We observed no difference in the number of transmitted versus nontransmitted truncating alleles for high-functioning autism (117 v. 130, p = 0.78). Transmitted truncating and de novo variants in high- functioning autism were not enriched in gene ontology (GO) or Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) categories, or in autism-related gene sets. However, in a patient with high-functioning autism we identified a de novo variant in a canonical splice site of LRP1, a postsynaptic density gene that is a target for fragile X mental retardation protein (FRMP). This de novo variant leads to in-frame skipping of exon 29, removing 2 of 6 blades of the [beta]-propeller domain 4 of LRP1, with putative functional consequences. Large data sets implicate LRP1 across a number of psychiatric disorders: de novo variants are associated with autism-spectrum disorder (p = 0.039) and schizophrenia (p = 0.008) from combined sequencing projects; common variants using genome-wide association study data sets from the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium show gene-based association in schizophrenia (p = 6.6 x [E.sup.-07]) and in a meta-analysis across 7 psychiatric disorders (p = 2.3 x [E.sup.-03]); and the burden of ultra-rare pathogenic variants has been shown to be higher in autism- spectrum disorder (p = 1.2 x [E.sup.-05]), using whole-exome sequencing from 6135 patients with schizophrenia, 1778 patients with autism- spectrum disorder and 7875 controls. Limitations: We had a limited sample of patients with high-functioning autism, related to difficulty in recruiting probands with high cognitive performance and no family history of psychiatric disorders. Conclusion: Previous studies and ours suggest an effect of truncating mutations restricted to severe autism-spectrum disorder phenotypes that are associated with intellectual disability. We provide evidence for pleiotropic effects of common and rare variants in the LRP1 gene across psychiatric phenotypes.

Purpose: Many athletes report consuming alcohol the day before their event, which might negatively affect their performance. However, the effects of previous-day alcohol ingestion on performance are equivocal, in part, due to no standardization of alcohol dose in previous studies. The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of a standardized previous-day alcohol dose and its corresponding impact on morning-after muscular strength, muscular power, and muscular fatigue in a short-duration test and on performance of severe-intensity exercise. Methods: On 2 occasions, 12 recreationally active individuals reported to the Applied Physiology Laboratory in the evening and ingested a beverage containing either 1.09 g ethanol·kg−1 fat-free body mass (ALC condition) or water (PLA condition). The following morning, they completed a hangover symptom questionnaire, vertical jumps, isometric midthigh pulls, biceps curls, and a constant-power cycle ergometer test to exhaustion. The responses from ALC and PLA were compared using paired-means t tests. Results: Time to exhaustion in the cycle ergometer tests was less (P =.03) in the ALC condition (181 [39] s vs 203 [34] s; –11%, Cohen d = 0.61). There was no difference in performance in vertical jump test, isometric midthigh pulls, and biceps curls tests between the ALC and PLA conditions. Conclusions: Previous-day alcohol consumption significantly reduces morning-after performance of severe-intensity exercise. Practitioners should educate their athletes, especially those whose events rely on anaerobic capacity and/or a rapid response of the aerobic pathways, of the adverse effect of previous-day alcohol consumption on performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]