This preprint may differ from the final copy-edited version. Highlights• From 4 years, children view an unhelpful person as an authority figure.• From 6 years, they predict subordinates, not authorities, will help third parties.• But they do not view helping or being helped as diagnostic about authority.• Once children hold consistent views, these match adults' intuitions.• Overall, people more easily associate authority with indifference to others' needs.

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 the target; however, this association was not influenced by children's knowledge of the target's disinterest, and there was no relation between shyness and children's support for a separate physical goal. Therefore, young children's decisions to act helpfully incorporate consideration for others beyond a focal person with an unmet need, and they are further constrained by children's own comfort with the actions required to help.

In hierarchical societies, what do we expect from people at the top? Early in life, children use horizontal relationships (e.g., affiliation) to predict selectivity in others’ prosocial behavior. But it is unknown whether they also view asymmetries in prosocial behavior as characteristic of vertical relationships (e.g., differences in social power). In two experiments, we investigated 4- to 7-year-old children’s and adults’ (N = 192) intuitions about links between relative authority status, helpful action, and unhelpful inaction. In Experiment 1, participants at all ages viewed a character who chose not to help another person as holding a position of authority over them; they also viewed this unhelpful character as less nice than the person in need. However, no age group made consistent inferences about the relative authority of a helper and helpee. In Experiment 2, children had mixed intuitions when separately predicting whether high- and low-authority characters would be helpful in the future. However, older children and adults consistently indicated that a subordinate would be more likely than an authority to help a third party. These findings establish that children’s social theories include expectations for links between power and prosociality by at least the preschool years. Whereas some judgments in this domain are stable from 4 years onward, others emerge gradually. Whether consistent responses occurred early or only later in development, however, all measures converged on a single intuition: People more easily associate authority with indifference to others’ needs.

Vascular tumours of the stomach are rare, representing 0.9%-3.3% of all gastric neoplasms. A 58 year old man was admitted as an emergency with a one day history of haematemesis and melaena. He underwent an emergency laparotomy for a tumour in the lesser curve of the stomach. The tumour showed the characteristic histological and immunohistochemical features of epithelioid haemangioendothelioma. Surgery in the form of wide excision seems to be the treatment of choice for this rare neoplasm. This case highlights the difficulty in diagnosing this rare tumour preoperatively and emphasises the need for long term follow up in view of its uncertain metastatic potential.

No abstract