Stereotypes as prototypes in children's gender concepts.

How do gender stereotypes shape prototypes across development? In the current pre-registered study with children ages 3- to 10-years-old and adults (N = 257), participants made judgements about which members of gender categories (boys and girls) and animal categories (for comparison) were the most representative and informative about their kinds, using simplified scales of five category members varying on a stereotypical feature (e.g., girls wearing more or less pink). Young children chose boys and girls with extreme stereotypical features (e.g., the girl in head-to-toe pink) as both representative and informative of their categories and this tendency declined with age, similar to developmental patterns in prototypes of animal categories. Controlling for age, children whose parents reported more conservative social-political views also held more extreme gender (but not animal) prototypes. Thus, stereotypes play a central role in children's gender prototypes, especially young children and those living in socially-conservative households. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://youtu.be/Ps9BwuukyD0 RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Stereotypes play a central role in children's gender prototypes, especially young children and those in socially-conservative households. Children ages 3-10 and adults chose which girls, boys, and animals were most representative and informative. Younger children chose category members with more extreme stereotypical features (e.g., the girl in head-to-toe pink) than older children and adults. Children with more conservative parents also held more extreme gender prototypes.

How "is" shapes "ought" for folk-biological concepts.

Knowing which features are frequent among a biological kind (e.g., that most zebras have stripes) shapes people's representations of what category members are like (e.g., that typical zebras have stripes) and normative judgments about what they ought to be like (e.g., that zebras should have stripes). In the current work, we ask if people's inclination to explain why features are frequent is a key mechanism through which what "is" shapes beliefs about what "ought" to be. Across four studies (N = 591), we find that frequent features are often explained by appeal to feature function (e.g., that stripes are for camouflage), that functional explanations in turn shape judgments of typicality, and that functional explanations and typicality both predict normative judgments that category members ought to have functional features. We also identify the causal assumptions that license inferences from feature frequency and function, as well as the nature of the normative inferences that are drawn: by specifying an instrumental goal (e.g., camouflage), functional explanations establish a basis for normative evaluation. These findings shed light on how and why our representations of how the natural world is shape our judgments of how it ought to be.

Categories convey prescriptive information across domains and development.

Young children display a pervasive bias to assume that what they observe in the world reflects how things are supposed to be. The current studies examined the nature of this bias by testing whether it reflects a particular form of reasoning about human social behaviors or a more general feature of category representations. Children aged 4 to 9 years and adults (N = 747) evaluated instances of nonconformity among members of novel biological and human social kinds. Children held prescriptive expectations for both animal and human categories; in both cases, they said it was wrong for a category member to engage in category-atypical behavior. These prescriptive judgments about categories depended on the extent to which people saw the pictured individual examples as representative of coherent categories. Thus, early prescriptive judgments appear to rely on the interplay between general conceptual biases and domain-specific beliefs about category structure.

Asking Children to "Be Helpers" Can Backfire After Setbacks.

Describing behaviors as reflecting categories (e.g., asking children to "be helpers") has been found to increase pro-social behavior. The present studies (N = 139, ages 4-5) tested whether such effects backfire if children experience setbacks while performing category-relevant actions. In Study 1, children were asked either to "be helpers" or "to help," and then pretended to complete a series of successful scenarios (e.g., pouring milk) and unsuccessful scenarios (e.g., spilling milk while trying to pour). After the unsuccessful trials, children asked to "be helpers" had more negative attitudes. In Study 2, asking children to "be helpers" impeded children's helping behavior after they experienced difficulties while trying to help. Implications for how category labels shape beliefs and behavior are discussed.

Is the most representative skunk the average or the stinkiest? Developmental changes in representations of biological categories.

People often think of categories in terms of their most representative examples (e.g., robin for BIRD). Thus, determining which exemplars are most representative is a fundamental cognitive process that shapes how people use concepts to navigate the world. The present studies (N = 669; ages 5 years - adulthood) revealed developmental change in this important component of cognition. Studies 1-2 found that young children view exemplars with extreme values of characteristic features (e.g., the very fastest cheetah) as most representative of familiar biological categories; the tendency to view average exemplars in this manner (e.g., the average-speeded cheetah) emerged slowly across age. Study 3 examined the mechanisms underlying these judgments, and found that participants of all ages viewed extreme exemplars as representative of novel animal categories when they learned that the variable features fulfilled category-specific adaptive needs, but not otherwise. Implications for developmental changes in conceptual structure and biological reasoning are discussed.

Risk Factors, Etiologies, and Screening Tools for Sepsis in Pregnant Women: A Multicenter Case-Control Study.

BACKGROUND: Given the significant morbidity and mortality of maternal sepsis, early identification is key to improve outcomes. This study aims to evaluate the performance characteristics of the systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS), quick Sequential [Sepsis-related] Organ Failure Assessment (qSOFA), and maternal early warning (MEW) criteria for identifying cases of impending sepsis in parturients. The secondary objective of this study is to identify etiologies and risk factors for maternal sepsis and to assess timing of antibiotics in patients diagnosed with sepsis. METHODS: Validated maternal sepsis cases during the delivery hospitalization from 1995 to 2012 were retrospectively identified at 7 academic medical centers in the United States and Israel. Control patients were matched by date of delivery in a 1:4 ratio. The sensitivity and specificity of SIRS, qSOFA, and MEW criteria for identifying sepsis were calculated. Data including potential risk factors, vital signs, laboratory values, and clinical management were collected for cases and controls. RESULTS: Eighty-two sepsis cases during the delivery hospitalization were identified and matched to 328 controls. The most common causes of sepsis were the following: chorioamnionitis 20 (24.4%), endometritis 19 (23.2%), and pneumonia 9 (11.0%). Escherichia coli 12 (14.6%), other Gram-negative rods 8 (9.8%), and group A Streptococcus 6 (7.3%) were the most commonly found pathogens. The sensitivities and specificities for meeting criteria for screening tools were as follows: (1) SIRS (0.93, 0.63); (2) qSOFA (0.50, 0.95); and (3) MEW criteria for identifying sepsis (0.82, 0.87). Of 82 women with sepsis, 10 (12.2%) died. The mortality rate for those who received antibiotics within 1 hour of diagnosis was 8.3%. The mortality rate was 20% for the patients who received antibiotics after >1 hour. CONCLUSIONS: Chorioamnionitis and endometritis were the most common causes of sepsis, together accounting for about half of cases. Notable differences were observed in the sensitivity and specificity of sepsis screening tools with the highest to lowest sensitivity being SIRS, MEW, and qSOFA criteria, and the highest to lowest specificity being qSOFA, MEW, and SIRS. Mortality was doubled in the cohort of patients who received antibiotics after >1 hour. Clinicians need to be vigilant to identify cases of peripartum sepsis early in its course and prioritize timely antibiotic therapy.

Assessment of the Postural Stability of Female and Male Athletes.

OBJECTIVE: Postural stability is often affected by sport-related injuries and subsequently evaluated during postinjury examinations. Intrinsic factors, however, may also affect postural control. We sought to compare the postural control of female and male athletes as measured simultaneously by (1) the modified balance error scoring system (mBESS) and (2) a video-force plate system. DESIGN: Cross-sectional study. SETTING: Sports injury prevention center. PARTICIPANTS: Pediatric, adolescent, and young adult athletes who performed mBESS during an injury prevention evaluation. INDEPENDENT VARIABLES: We compared the postural control of female and male athletes. We also accounted for independent variables associated with postural stability, including age, body mass index, and history of ankle injury, concussion, and migraine headache. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Total errors committed during the mBESS and measurements derived from integrated kinematic and kinetic data obtained by a video-force plate system. Differences between males and females were tested using analysis of covariance. RESULTS: Participants (n = 409) ranged in age from 10 to 29 years (mean = 14.6 ± 2.8); 60% were female. No significant differences on mBESS were detected between females and males; however, female athletes demonstrated significantly better postural stability on the video-force plate analysis during double-leg (P = 0.03, d = 0.28), single-leg (P < 0.001, d = 0.62), and tandem stances (P < 0.001, d = 0.53) when compared with males. CONCLUSIONS: Uninjured female athletes demonstrate better postural stability on video-force plate analysis than their uninjured male counterparts. These findings provide an important information assistive to clinicians during interpretation of postinjury balance tests.

Comprehension of English for-adverbials: The Nature of Lexical Meanings and the Neurocognitive Architecture of Language.

What is the nature of lexical meanings such that they can both compose with others and also appear boundless? We investigate this question by examining the compositional properties of for-time adverbial as in "Ana jumped for an hour." At issue is the source of the associated iterative reading which lacks overt morphophonological support, yet, the iteration is not disconnected from the lexical meanings in the sentence. This suggests an analysis whereby the iterative reading is the result of the interaction between lexical meanings under a specific compositional configuration. We test the predictions of two competing accounts: Mismatch-and-Repair and Partition-Measure. They differ in their assumptions about lexical meanings: assumptions that have implications for the possible compositional mechanisms that each can invoke. Mismatch-and-Repair assumes that lexical meaning representations are discrete, separate from the conceptual system from which they originally emerged and brought into sentence meaning through syntactic composition. Partition-Measure assumes that lexical meanings are contextually salient conceptual structures substantially indistinguishable from the conceptual system that they inhabit. During comprehension, lexical meanings construe a conceptual representation, in parallel, morphosyntactic and morphophonological composition as determined by the lexical items involved in the sentence. Whereas both hypotheses capture the observed cost in the punctual predicate plus for-time adverbial composition (e.g., jump (vs. swim) for an hour), their predictions differ regarding iteration with durative predicates; for example, swim for a year (vs. for an hour). Mismatch-and-Repair predicts contrasting processing profiles and nonoverlapping activation patterns along punctuality differences. Partition-Measure predicts overlapping processing and cortical distribution profiles, along the presence of iterativity. Results from a self-paced reading and an functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) studies bear out the predictions of the Partition-Measure account, supporting a view of linguistic meaning composition in line with an architecture of language whereby combinatoriality and generativity are distributed, carried out in parallel across linguistic and nonlinguistic subsystems.

Preservation of mitochondrial membrane potential is necessary for lifespan extension from dietary restriction.

Dietary restriction (DR) increases lifespan in many organisms, but its underlying mechanisms are not fully understood. Mitochondria play a central role in metabolic regulation and are known to undergo changes in structure and function in response to DR. Mitochondrial membrane potential (Δψm) is the driving force for ATP production and mitochondrial outputs that integrate many cellular signals. One such signal regulated by Δψm is nutrient-status sensing. Here, we tested the hypothesis that DR promotes longevity through preserved Δψm during adulthood. Using the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, we find that Δψm declines with age relatively early in the lifespan, and this decline is attenuated by DR. Pharmacologic depletion of Δψm blocked the longevity and health benefits of DR. Genetic perturbation of Δψm and mitochondrial ATP availability similarly prevented lifespan extension from DR. Taken together, this study provides further evidence that appropriate regulation of Δψm is a critical factor for health and longevity in response to DR.

One strike and you're a lout: Cherished values increase the stringency of moral character attributions.

Moral dilemmas are inescapable in daily life, and people must often choose between two desirable character traits, like being a diligent employee or being a devoted parent. These moral dilemmas arise because people hold competing moral values that sometimes conflict. Furthermore, people differ in which values they prioritize, so we do not always approve of how others resolve moral dilemmas. How are we to think of people who sacrifice one of our most cherished moral values for a value that we consider less important? The "Good True Self Hypothesis" predicts that we will reliably project our most strongly held moral values onto others, even after these people lapse. In other words, people who highly value generosity should consistently expect others to be generous, even after they act frugally in a particular instance. However, reasoning from an error-management perspective instead suggests the "Moral Stringency Hypothesis," which predicts that we should be especially prone to discredit the moral character of people who deviate from our most deeply cherished moral ideals, given the potential costs of affiliating with people who do not reliably adhere to our core moral values. In other words, people who most highly value generosity should be quickest to stop considering others to be generous if they act frugally in a particular instance. Across two studies conducted on Prolific (N = 966), we found consistent evidence that people weight moral lapses more heavily when rating others' membership in highly cherished moral categories, supporting the Moral Stringency Hypothesis. In Study 2, we examined a possible mechanism underlying this phenomenon. Although perceptions of hypocrisy played a role in moral updating, personal moral values and subsequent judgments of a person's potential as a good cooperative partner provided the clearest explanation for changes in moral character attributions. Overall, the robust tendency toward moral stringency carries significant practical and theoretical implications.

Dataset of surveyed PFAS in water, sediment, and soil of Fountain Creek Watershed, Colorado, USA.

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are widespread and highly persistent organic chemicals with adverse health effects. The US Environmental Protection Agency has issued health advisory limits of 70 ng/L for aqueous concentrations of PFOA + PFOS. In the Colorado Springs, Colorado (USA), metro area, the Widefield Aquifer (groundwater) and Fountain Creek Watershed (surface water) have been contaminated by PFAS from aqueous film-forming foams. Here we present the concentrations of selected linear and branched isomers of legacy PFAS found in surface water (n = 95), soil (n = 83), and sediment (n = 34) samples collected from several creeks of the Fountain Creek Watershed. Collected samples were prepared for high-performance liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (LC/MS/MS) analysis via liquid/liquid extraction and/or solid phase extraction (SPE). This dataset includes the geographic locations of sampled creeks, LC/MS/MS instrumental conditions, method verification data including percent recovery to assess method accuracy and background contamination of PFAS in laboratory reagents and supplies, and determined concentrations of PFAS in water, soil, and sediment samples. These locations were surveyed monthly for a full year and provide a rich dataset to assess influence of sampling location, temporal variability in concentration, and overall contaminant persistence.

Speaking of Kinds: How Correcting Generic Statements can Shape Children's Concepts.

Generic language (e.g., "tigers have stripes") leads children to assume that the referenced category (e.g., tigers) is inductively informative and provides a causal explanation for the behavior of individual members. In two preregistered studies with 4- to 7-year-old children (N = 497), we considered the mechanisms underlying these effects by testing how correcting generics might affect the development of these beliefs about novel social and animal kinds (Study 1) and about gender (Study 2). Correcting generics by narrowing their scope to a single individual limited beliefs that the referenced categories could explain what their members would be like while broadening the scope to a superordinate category (Study 2) uniquely limited endorsement of gender norms. Across both studies, correcting generics did not alter beliefs about feature heritability and had mixed effects on inductive inferences, suggesting that additional mechanisms (e.g., causal reasoning about shared features) contribute to the development of full-blown essentialist beliefs. These results help illuminate the mechanisms by which generics lead children to view categories as having rich inductive and causal potential; in particular, they suggest that children interpret generics as signals that speakers in their community view the referenced categories as meaningful kinds that support generalization. The findings also point the way to concrete suggestions for how adults can effectively correct problematic generics (e.g., gender stereotypes) that children may hear in daily life.

How race and gender shape the development of social prototypes in the United States.

The present studies examined how gender and race information shape children's prototypes of various social categories. Children (N = 543; Mage = 5.81, range = 2.75-10.62; 281 girls, 262 boys; 193 White, 114 Asian, 71 Black, 50 Hispanic, 39 Multiracial, 7 Middle-Eastern, 69 race unreported) most often chose White people as prototypical of boys and men-a pattern that increased with age. For female gender categories, children most often selected a White girl as prototypical of girls, but an Asian woman as prototypical of women. For superordinate social categories (person and kid), children chose members of their own gender as most representative. Overall, the findings reveal how cultural ideologies and children's own group memberships interact to shape the development of social prototypes across childhood. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Developmental Changes in Strategies for Gathering Evidence About Biological Kinds.

How do people gather samples of evidence to learn about the world? Adults often prefer to sample evidence from diverse sources-for example, choosing to test a robin and a turkey to find out if something is true of birds in general. Children below age 9, however, often do not consider sample diversity, instead treating non-diverse samples (e.g., two robins) and diverse samples as equivalently informative. The current study (N = 247) found that this discontinuity stems from developmental changes in standards for evaluating evidence-younger children chose to learn from samples that best approximate idealized views of what category members are supposed to be like (e.g., the fastest cheetahs), with a gradual shift across age toward samples that cover more within-category variation (e.g., cheetahs of varying speeds). These findings have implications for the relation between conceptual structure and inductive reasoning, and for the mechanisms underlying inductive reasoning more generally.

Advancing Developmental Science via Unmoderated Remote Research with Children.

This article introduces an accessible approach to implementing unmoderated remote research in developmental science-research in which children and families participate in studies remotely and independently, without directly interacting with researchers. Unmoderated remote research has the potential to strengthen developmental science by: (1) facilitating the implementation of studies that are easily replicable, (2) allowing for new approaches to longitudinal studies and studies of parent-child interaction, and (3) including families from more diverse backgrounds and children growing up in more diverse environments in research. We describe an approach we have used to design and implement unmoderated remote research that is accessible to researchers with limited programming expertise, and we describe the resources we have made available on a new website (discoveriesonline.org) to help researchers get started with implementing this approach. We discuss the potential of this method for developmental science and highlight some challenges still to be overcome to harness the power of unmoderated remote research for advancing the field.

Normative Social Role Concepts in Early Childhood.

The current studies (N = 255, children ages 4-5 and adults) explore patterns of age-related continuity and change in conceptual representations of social role categories (e.g., "scientist"). In Study 1, young children's judgments of category membership were shaped by both category labels and category-normative traits, and the two were dissociable, indicating that even young children's conceptual representations for some social categories have a "dual character." In Study 2, when labels and traits were contrasted, adults and children based their category-based induction decisions on category-normative traits rather than labels. Study 3 confirmed that children reason based on category-normative traits because they view them as an obligatory part of category membership. In contrast, adults in this study viewed the category-normative traits as informative on their own (not only as a cue to obligations). Implications for continuity and change in representations of social role categories will be discussed.

Heart disease in Friedreich's ataxia.

Friedreich's ataxia (FRDA), which occurs in 1/50000 live births, is the most prevalent inherited neuromuscular disorder. Nearly all FRDA patients develop cardiomyopathy at some point in their lives. The clinical manifestations of FRDA include ataxia of the limbs and trunk, dysarthria, diabetes mellitus, and cardiac diseases. However, the broad clinical spectrum makes FRDA difficult to identify. The diagnosis of FRDA is based on the presence of suspicious clinical factors, the use of the Harding criteria and, more recently, the use of genetic testing for identifying the expansion of a triplet nucleotide sequence. FRDA is linked to a defect in the mitochondrial protein frataxin; an epigenetic alteration interferes with the folding of this protein, causing a relative deficiency of frataxin in affected patients. Frataxins are small essential proteins whose deficiency causes a range of metabolic disturbances, including oxidative stress, iron-sulfur cluster deficits, and defects in heme synthesis, sulfur amino acid metabolism, energy metabolism, stress responses, and mitochondrial function. The cardiac involvement seen in FRDA is a consequence of mitochondrial proliferation as well as the loss of contractile proteins and the subsequent development of myocardial fibrosis. The walls of the left ventricle become thickened, and different phenotypic manifestations are seen, including concentric or asymmetric hypertrophy and (less commonly) dilated cardiomyopathy. Dilated cardiomyopathy and arrhythmia are associated with mortality in patients with FRDA, whereas hypertrophic cardiomyopathy is not. Systolic function tends to be low-normal in FRDA patients, with an acute decline at the end of life. However, the literature includes only a few long-term prospective studies of cardiac progression in FRDA, and the cause of death is often attributed to heart failure and arrhythmia postmortem. Cardiomyopathy tends to be correlated with the clinical neurologic age of onset and the nucleotide triplet repeat length (i.e., markers of phenotypic disease severity) rather than the duration of disease or the severity of neurologic symptoms. As most patients are wheelchair-bound within 15 years of diagnosis, the clinical determination of cardiac involvement is often complicated by comorbidities. Researchers are currently testing targeted therapies for FRDA, and a centralized database, patient registry, and natural history study have been launched to support these clinical trials. The present review discusses the pathogenesis, clinical manifestations, and spectrum of cardiac disease in FRDA patients and then introduces gene-targeted and pathology-specific therapies as well as screening guidelines that should be used to monitor cardiac disease in this mitochondrial disorder.