Brandon Frank Terrizzi

When navigating unfamiliar social environments, it is important to identify who is powerful. Determining who has power can be challenging because observers may have limited social information, and because people achieve influence for many reasons. In experiments with 3- to 5-year-old children (n = 192) and adults (n = 32), we investigated the devel...

In hierarchical societies, what do we expect from people at the top? Early in life, children use horizontal social relationships (e.g., affiliation) to predict selectivity in prosocial behavior. But it is unknown whether they view asymmetries in prosocial behavior as characteristic of vertical relationships (e.g., differences in social power) as we...

Objective: To investigate whether exposure to tobacco smoke during early brain development is linked with later problems in behavior and executive function. Study design: We studied 239 children in a prospective birth cohort. We measured tobacco exposures by caregiver report and serum cotinine 3 times during pregnancy and 4 times during childhoo...

Objective: Adults’ mental representations of the physical appearance of people that are “strong” and people that are “in charge” are remarkably similar. Some have explained this feature of adults’ thinking by positing innate mental representations. However, specific details about the nature and structure of these representations, and an appropriate...

This research examines the proximate evaluative mechanisms underlying prosocial partner choice-based reciprocity. Across four studies we presented 855 university undergraduates (online for course credit) and 76 4- to 6-year-olds (offline at a university laboratory) with vignettes describing prosocial, social and non-social characters, and asked par...

This research examines the proximate evaluative mechanisms underlying prosocial, partner choice-based reciprocity. Across four studies we presented 855 university undergraduates (online for course credit) and 76 4- to 6-year-olds (offline at a university laboratory) with vignettes describing prosocial, social, and nonsocial characters, and asked pa...

From an early age, children recognize that people belong to social groups. However, not all groups are structured in the same way. The current study asked whether children recognize and distinguish among different decision-making structures. If so, do they prefer some decision-making structures over others? In these studies, children were told stor...

Background: Transgender and gender-diverse (TGD) youth face health care decisions that are complicated by both social and medical aspects of gender care. Little is known about how providers support decision-making in this context or the gaps they perceive in decision support. Objective: To explore health care providers' perspectives on the decis...

Background Polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) are persistent environmental pollutants used as flame retardants. Gestational PBDE exposure has been associated with a variety of behavior problems in children, but little is known about its impact into adolescence, particularly on social skills, which are important for achieving social competence,...

From an early age, children recognize that people belong to social groups. However, not all groups are structured in the same way. The current study asked whether children recognize and distinguish among different decision-making structures. If so, do they prefer some decision-making structures over others? In two studies, 6-to-8-year-old children...

In recent years, there has been a heated debate about how to interpret findings that seem to show that humans rapidly and automatically calculate the visual perspectives of others. In the current study, we investigated the question of whether automatic interference effects found in the dot-perspective task (Samson, Apperly, Braithwaite, Andrews, &...

Objective: Adults’ mental representations of the physical appearance of people that are “strong” and people that are “in charge” are remarkably similar. Some have explained this feature of adults’ thinking by positing innate mental representations. However, specific details about the nature and structure of these representations and an appropriate...

When navigating unfamiliar social environments, it is important to identify who is powerful. Determining who has power can be challenging because observers may have limited social information, and because people achieve influence for many reasons. In experiments with 3- to 5-year-old children (n = 192) and adults (n = 32), we investigated the devel...

When someone is in need, providing help may be seen as obligatory, and inaction itself deemed impermissible. At what age do young children view helping as obligatory?

This study examined social influences on 3-year-old children’s decisions to help an experimenter gain another person’s attention (N = 32). Children were slower to help the experimenter when the target had previously expressed disinterest in attending to her. Shy children were less likely to support the experimenter’s attempts to communicate with th...

In the current study we assessed preschool children and adults' reflexive, covert spatial attentional response to a novel entity. In particular, we assessed whether covert attention was selectively engaged after construing the novel entity as an agent. Previous research has demonstrated that children and adults' covert spatial attention may be flex...