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 10 (N = 257) from the United States, varying transgressor intent and remorse in a behavioral task that pits punishment against forgiveness. We find that baseline levels of forgiveness are high, suggesting children assume the best of transgressors in the absence of information about intent and remorse. We also find age-related increases in sensitivity to intent, but not remorse, such that older children are more likely to forgive accidental transgressions. As forgiveness is an important tool in the human social toolkit, exploring the ways in which this ability develops across age can help us better understand the early roots of human cooperation.

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 10 (N = 257) from the United States, varying transgressor intent and remorse in a behavioral task that pits punishment against forgiveness. We find that baseline levels of forgiveness are high, suggesting children assume the best of transgressors in the absence of information about intent and remorse. We also find age-related increases in sensitivity to intent, but not remorse, such that older children are more likely to forgive accidental transgressions. As forgiveness is an important tool in the human social toolkit, exploring the ways in which this ability develops across age can help us better understand the early roots of human cooperation.

No abstract

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 trustor, meaning we know little about the ontogeny of trustworthiness. Whereas trusting can be motivated by self-interest, one-shot trustworthiness is more squarely situated in the prosocial domain, involving a direct tradeoff between self-interest and others’ interests. However, this raises the question of whether trustworthiness is distinct from generosity. In this preregistered study, we examine the origins of trustworthiness using an intuitive version of the Trust Game, in which a first party invests resources in a second party who can split the gains. We recruited N = 118 5-to-8 year-old American children (Mage = 6.94, n = 59 girls, 57% White, 88% of parents with bachelor's degree or higher), split between the Trustworthiness condition, where another party’s investment is instrumental for obtaining greater resources, and the Generosity condition, where the other party is a passive recipient. We found that children in the Trustworthiness condition shared significantly more resources than those in the Generosity condition. Further, children in the Trustworthiness condition predicted that the first party expected them to share a greater number of resources. Overall, these results demonstrate that trustworthiness is distinct from generosity in childhood and suggest that children spontaneously grasp and engage in a key aspect of cooperation.

Palatable foods can stimulate appetite without hunger, and unconstrained overeating underlies obesity and binge eating disorder. Women are more prone to obesity and binge eating than men but the neural causes of individual differences are unknown. In an animal model of hedonic eating, a prior study found that females were more susceptible than males to eat palatable food when sated and that the neuropeptide orexin/hypocretisn (ORX) was crucial in both sexes. The current study examined potential forebrain targets of ORX signaling during hedonic eating. We measured Fos induction in the cortical, thalamic, striatal, and amygdalar areas that receive substantial ORX inputs and contain their receptors in hungry and sated male and female rats during consumption of a palatable (high-sucrose) food. During the test, hungry rats of both sexes ate substantial amounts, and while sated males ate much less than hungry rats, sated females ate as much as hungry rats. The Fos induction analysis identified sex differences in recruitment of specific areas of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), paraventricular nucleus of the thalamus (PVT), nucleus accumbens (ACB), and central nucleus of the amygdala (CEA), and similar patterns across sexes in the insular cortex and areas of the ACB and CEA. There was a striking activation of the mPFC in sated males, who consumed the least amount food and unique correlations between the PVT and the CEA in females and the PVT and ACB in males. The study identified key functional circuits that may drive hedonic eating in a sex specific manner.