Thoughts about a successful future encourage action in the face of challenge

College environments can put lower socioeconomic status (SES) female students at particular risk of withdrawing during challenging academic situations. However, thinking about reaching a successful future identity may encourage these students to take action rather than withdraw. In a laboratory experiment, we tested the hypothesis that imagining a successful future identity would help lower SES female students to actively and successfully confront challenging tasks (i.e., a mock student–faculty interaction and difficult academic test). As predicted, when future identities were cued rather than past identities, lower SES female students demonstrated greater action readiness. Specifically, they showed more expansive body posture during the mock interaction and more attempts to complete the academic test, which led to better performance. The motivation to take action among higher SES and male students, who are at lower risk of vulnerability in college environments, was not influenced by future identities.     

Gradual improvement in fine-grained sensitivity to triadic gaze after 6 years of age

The current research compared the ability of adults and children to determine where another person is looking in shared visual space (triadic gaze). In Experiment 1, children (6-, 8-, 10-, and 14-year-olds) and adults viewed photographs of a model fixating a series of positions separated by 1.6° along the horizontal plane. The task was to indicate whether the model was looking to the left or right of one of three target positions (midline, 6.4° left, or 6.4° right). By 6 years of age, thresholds were quite small (M=1.94°) but were roughly twice as large as those of adults (M=1.05°). Thresholds decreased to adult-like levels around 10 years of age. All age groups showed the same pattern of higher sensitivity for central targets than peripheral targets and of misjudging gaze toward peripheral targets as farther from midline than it really was. In subsequent experiments, we evaluated possible reasons for the higher thresholds in 6- and 8-year-olds. In Experiment 2, the thresholds of 6-year-olds did not improve when the range of deviations from the target position that the model fixated covered a much wider range. In Experiment 3, 8-year-olds were less sensitive than adults to small shifts in eye position even though the task required only matching faces with the same eye position and not determining where the person was looking. These findings suggest that by 6 years of age, children are quite sensitive to triadic gaze, which may support inferences about others' interests and intentions. Subsequent improvements in sensitivity involve, at least in part, an increase in sensitivity to eye position.     

The development of fine-grained sensitivity to eye contact after 6 years of age

Adults use eye contact as a cue to the mental and emotional states of others. Here, we examined developmental changes in the ability to discriminate between eye contact and averted gaze. Children (6-, 8-, 10-, and 14-year-olds) and adults (n=18/age) viewed photographs of a model fixating the center of a camera lens and a series of positions to the left/right or upward/downward and judged whether the model's gaze was direct or averted to the left/right or upward/downward. The horizontal range of fixation positions leading to the perception of direct gaze (the cone of gaze) was more than 50% larger in 6-year-olds than in adults, but it was adult-like and smaller than the vertical cone of gaze by 8 years of age. The vertical cone of gaze was large and statistically adult-like by age 6, with only a small linear reduction thereafter. In all age groups, the horizontal cone of gaze was centered on the bridge of the participant's nose and the vertical cone was centered slightly below the participant's eye height. These findings indicate that until after age 6, relatively poor sensitivity to direct versus averted gaze limits children's ability to use gaze cues to make social judgments.     

Optimistic personality and psychosocial well-being during treatment predict psychosocial well-being among long-term survivors of breast cancer.

In considering well-being among survivors of life-threatening illnesses such as breast cancer, 2 important questions are whether there is continuity between initial adjustment and longer term adjustment and what role personality plays in long-term adjustment. In this research, a sample of 163 early stage breast cancer patients whose psychosocial adjustment was first assessed during the year after surgery completed the same measures 5-13 years after surgery. Initial reports of well-being were relatively strong predictors of follow-up well-being on the same measures. Initial optimism and marital status also predicted follow-up adjustment, even controlling for earlier adjustment, which exerted a substantial unique effect in multivariate analyses. In contrast, initial medical variables played virtually no predictive role. There is substantial continuity of subjective well-being across many years among survivors of breast cancer, rooted partly in personality and social connection.     

Exploitation,Justice, and Parity in International Clinical Research

Consensus is lacking among research ethicists on the question of how broadly to understand the requirements of non‐exploitation in international clinical research. Two types of principles have been proposed, minimalist and non‐minimalist, grounded in two opposing conceptions of exploitation, transactional and systemic. Transactionalists have offered principles, which, it has been argued, are satisfied by minimal gains to vulnerable subjects measured against an unjust status quo. Systemicists have advanced principles with decidedly non‐minimal mandates but only by conflating the obligations of clinical research with those of First World citizenship. My aim here is to break this deadlock by offering grounds for a non‐minimal requirement of international research ethics grounded in a transactional conception of exploitation. I do this by arguing that a subject's gains must be measured not only within the transaction, relative to her own starting point and to the share of gains enjoyed by her co‐transactor, but also across transactions, so as to ensure parity of benefit to trial participants whenever, and wherever, parity of burden is assumed.