Child Neurosuite

01/05/2022

New study with Dr. Minkang Kim shows that parents’ moral values influence their children’s early neural responses to third-party harm and their costly intervention behavior (e.g. verbal reprimand, policing and protesting).

One means by which humans maintain social cooperation is through intervention in third-party transgressions, a behaviour observable from the early years of development. While it has been argued that pre-school age children’s intervention behaviour is driven by normative understandings, there is sc...

06/19/2021

Across countries (Canada, China, Colombia, Jordan, Turkey, South Africa and USA), girls showed greater levels of situational empathy and empathic disposition than boys. Child empathic disposition, but not situational empathy or prosociality, was associated with parental empathic disposition. Older children showed more prosocial sharing than young ones, but prosocial sharing was not influenced by child empathic disposition.

This study examined individual influences on child empathy, the relationship between child and parent empathy, and the relationship between empathy and prosociality across seven countries. A large s...

03/24/2021

Teaching children to be kind and care for others may help those from deprived neighborhoods close the gap with their more advantaged classmates.

03/17/2021

Cognitive neuroscientists use brain imaging and behavioral economic games to investigate people's sense of fairness. They find it's common to take care of yourself before looking out for others.

03/01/2021

Recognizing the place of moral reasons, not just emotions, offers a starting point for mutual understanding. Despite our inevitable disagreements, humans show a shared capacity for moral reasoning from a remarkably early age. Without this capacity, notions of human rights and social justice would be unimaginable.

It’s not just ‘gut feelings’: humans form moral judgments that align with moral principles and beliefs from a young age

01/18/2021

Nurturing fatherhood was embedded in male biology long ago and likely laid evolutionary foundations for other fathering roles.

01/05/2021

Infants possess innate predispositions towards sociomoral evaluations as well as preferences that guide their expectations of others in relation to fairness, empathic concern, reciprocity, and group affiliation. Such predispositions can be considered as emergent properties of gene-culture coevolution.
This new article by Jean Decety, Nik Steinbeis and Jason Cowell is free to download.

Human social preferences are the product of gene-culture coevolution, and rely on predispositions that emerge early in development. These social prefe…

11/16/2020

New research at the University of Virginia has found evidence that children as young as 3 show physiological changes (dilation of the eyes’ pupils) that co-occur with the distinction these toddlers draw between violations of moral and conventional norms.

Children as young as three show specific neurobiological changes, such as pupil dilation, when they witness violations of moral or conventional norms.

10/11/2020

Children who learn to play musical instruments have an edge over their non-musical peers when it comes to learning, memory, and attention. Those who learn musical instruments showed greater activity in the inferior frontal gyrus and the supramarginal gyrus, which are parts of the "phonological loop"...

09/24/2020

Being held by a parent with skin-to-skin contact reduces how strongly a newborn baby’s brain responds to a painful medical jab.

Skin-to-skin contact between a parent and newborn reduces how strongly a baby's brain responds to pain.

09/12/2020

When kids “pass” the marshmallow test, are they simply better at self-control or is something else going on? A new UC San Diego study revisits the classic psychology experiment and reports that part of what may be at work is that children care more deeply than previously known what authority fig...