Dorsa Amir

University of California, Berkeley | UCB · Department of Psychology

Researchers have long been interested in the relationship between feeling what you believe others feel?often described as empathy?and caring about the welfare of others?often described as compassion or concern. Many propose that empathy is a prerequisite for concern and is therefore the ultimate motivator of prosocial actions. To assess this hypoth...

While there has been a recent increase in focus on the role of early life socioeconomic status (SES) on preferences and decision-making, there is still debate surrounding the proper theoretical framework for understanding such effects. Some have argued that early life SES can fundamentally shift time preferences per se, such that those from low SES...

Risk and time preferences have often been viewed as reflecting inherent traits such as impatience and self-control. Here, we offer an alternative perspective, arguing that they are flexible and environmentally informed. In Study 1, we investigated risk and time preferences among children in the United States, India, and Argentina, as well as forage...

Like psychology more broadly, developmental psychology has long suffered from a narrow focus on children from WEIRD societies—or those that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. In this review, we discuss how developmental scientists have sought to correct this bias through two complementary approaches: one centered on detail...

Hadza food-sharing is extremely generous and often extends to individuals outside the household. Some anthropologists have proposed that individuals, especially men, share food beyond the household in order to signal foraging skill. While correlational data have been used to both evidence and critique this hypothesis, it has less often been experim...

When interacting with infants, humans often alter their speech and song in ways thought to support communication. Theories of human child-rearing, informed by data on vocal signalling across species, predict that such alterations should appear globally. Here, we show acoustic differences between infant-directed and adult-directed vocalizations acro...

Not applicable for this Letter.

In psychological research, there are often assumptions about the conditions that children expect to encounter during their development. These assumptions shape prevailing ideas about the experiences that children are capable of adjusting to, and whether their responses are viewed as impairments or adaptations. Specifically, the expected childhood i...

Recent work suggests that an important cognitive mechanism promoting coordination is common knowledge—a heuristic for representing recursive mental states. Yet, we know little about how common knowledge promotes coordination. We propose that common knowledge increases coordination by reducing uncertainty about others' cooperative behavior. We exami...

Interpersonal trust is a key component of cooperation, helping support the complex social networks found across societies. Trust typically involves two parties, one who trusts by taking on risk through investment in a second party, who can be trustworthy and produce mutual benefits. To date, the developmental literature has focused primarily on the...

Recent work suggests that an important cognitive mechanism promoting coordination is common knowledge—a heuristic for representing recursive mental states. Yet, we know little about how common knowledge promotes coordination. We propose that common knowledge increases coordination by reducing uncertainty about others’ cooperative behavior. We exami...

Forgiveness is a powerful feature of human social life, allowing for the restoration of positive cooperative relationships. Despite its importance, we know relatively little about how forgiveness develops during early life and the features that shape forgiveness decisions. Here, we investigated forgiveness behavior in children aged 5–10 years (N =...

Interpersonal trust is a key component of cooperation, helping support the complex social networks found across societies. Trust typically involves two parties, one who trusts by taking on risk through investment in a second party, who can be trustworthy and produce mutual benefits. To date, the developmental literature has focused primarily on the...

Objective Anemia is an important global health challenge. We investigate anemia prevalence among Indigenous Shuar of Ecuador to expand our understanding of population‐level variation, and to test hypotheses about how anemia variation is related to age, sex, and market integration. Methods Hemoglobin levels were measured in a total sample of 1650 S...

Forgiveness is a powerful feature of human social life, allowing for the restoration of positive, cooperative relationships. Despite its importance, we know relatively little about how forgiveness develops in early life and the features that shape forgiveness decisions. Here, we investigate forgiveness behavior in children between the ages of 5 and...

When reasoning about the mechanisms of complex entities, it is important to consider their internal parts. Previous research has shown that young children view “insides” as critical to how objects function. However, whether children hold specific expectations regarding complex objects’ insides remains an open question. Here, children (n = 378) and...

Like psychology more broadly, developmental psychology has long suffered from a narrow focus on children from WEIRD societies—or those that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. In this review, we discuss how developmental scientists have sought to correct this bias through two complementary approaches: one centered on detail...

Subjective Social Status (SSS) is a robust predictor of psychological and physiological outcomes, frequently measured as self-reported placement on the MacArthur Scale of Subjective Social Status. Despite its importance, however, there are still open questions regarding how early into ontogeny SSS can be measured, and how well SSS measures can be e...

Objectives: Little research exists documenting levels of intestinal inflammation among indigenous populations where exposure to macroparasites, like soil-transmitted helminths (STHs), is common. Reduced STH exposure is hypothesized to contribute to increased prevalence of elevated intestinal inflammation in wealthy nations, likely due to coevoluti...

While there has been a recent increase in focus on the role of early life socioeconomic status (SES) on preferences and decision-making, there is still debate surrounding the proper theoretical framework for understanding such effects. Some have argued that early life SES can fundamentally shift time preferences per se, such that those from low SES...

Laughter is a nonverbal vocalization occurring in every known culture, ubiquitous across all forms of human social interaction. Here, we examined whether listeners around the world, irrespective of their own native language and culture, can distinguish between spontaneous laughter and volitional laughter—laugh types likely generated by different vo...

Although the authors make a compelling case that early-life deprivation leads to present orientation, we believe that such behaviors may be better understood in terms of an underlying risk-management strategy, in which those who experience such deprivation are more risk-averse. The model we sketch accommodates the authors' present-orientation obser...

A prominent feature of fear memories and anxiety disorders is that they endure across extended periods of time. Here, we examine how the severity of the initial fear experience influences incubation, generalization, and sensitization of contextual fear memories across time. Adult rats were presented with either five, two, one, or zero shocks (1.2 m...

Background: Market integration (MI)-increasing production for and consumption from a market-based economy-is drastically altering traditional ways of life and environmental conditions among indigenous Amazonian peoples. The effects of MI on the biology and health of Amazonian children and adolescents, however, remain unclear. Aim: This study exa...

Richerson et al. make a compelling case for cultural evolution. In focusing on cultural group selection, however, they neglect important individual-level accounts of cultural evolution. While scientific discourse typically links cultural evolution to group selection and genetic evolution to individual selection, this association is due only to hist...

Objectives Cortisol levels exhibit a diurnal rhythm in healthy men, with peaks in the morning and troughs in the evening. Throughout age, however, this rhythm tends to flatten. This diurnal flattening has been demonstrated in a majority of industrialized populations, although the results have not been unanimous. Regardless, little attention has bee...

Progesterone and cholesterol are both vital to pregnancy. Among other functions, progesterone downregulates inflammatory responses, allowing for maternal immune tolerance of the fetal allograft. Cholesterol a key component of cell membranes, is important in intracellular transport, cell signaling, nerve conduction, and metabolism Despite the import...

Pharmacological Resistance of Stress Enhanced Fear Learning in an Animal Model of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Virginia Long, Wendy Fujioka, Dorsa Amir and Michael Fanselow University of California, Los Angeles USA 1. Introduction In anxiety disorders such as PTSD, normal fear responding and learning, which is adaptive and helps us survive, is al...