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 hypothesis, the authors developed the Empathy Index, which consists of 2 novel scales, and explored their relationship to a measure of concern as well as to measures of cooperative and altruistic behavior. A series of factor analyses reveal that empathy and concern consistently load on different factors. Furthermore, they show that empathy and concern motivate different behaviors: concern for others is a uniquely positive predictor of prosocial action whereas empathy is either not predictive or negatively predictive of prosocial actions. Together these studies suggest that empathy and concern are psychologically distinct and empathy plays a more limited role in our moral lives than many believe. (PsycINFO Database Record

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Humans often produce vocalizations for infants that differ from vocalizations for adults. Is this property common across societies? The forms of infant-directed vocalizations may be shaped by their function in parent-infant communication. If so, infant-directed song and speech should be differentiable from adult-directed song and speech on the basis of their acoustic features, and this property should be relatively invariant across cultures. To test this hypothesis, we built a corpus of 1,614 recordings of infant-and adult-directed singing and speech produced by 411 people living in 21 urban, rural, and small-scale societies. We studied the corpus in a massive online experiment and in a series of acoustic analyses. Naïve listeners (N = 13,218) reliably identified infant-directed vocalizations as infant-directed, and adult-directed speech (but not songs) as adult-directed, at rates far higher than chance. Ratings of infant-directed song were the most accurate and the most consistent across all societies; infant-directed speech was accurately identified on average, but inconsistently across societies. To determine the mechanisms underlying these results, we extracted many acoustic features from each recording and identified those that most reliably characterize infant-directed song and speech across cultures, via preregistered exploratory-confirmatory analyses and machine classification. The features distinguishing infant-and adult-directed song and speech concerned pitch, rhythmic, phonetic, and timbral attributes; a hypothesis-free classifier with cross-validation across societies reliably identified all vocalization types, with highest accuracy for infant-directed song. Last, we isolated 12 acoustic features that were predictive of perceived infant-directedness; of these, two pitch attributes (median F0 and its variability) were by far the most explanatory. These findings demonstrate cross-cultural regularities in infant-directed vocalizations that are suggestive of universality; moreover, infant-directed song appears to be more cross-culturally stereotyped than infant-directed speech, informing hypotheses of the functions and evolution of both.

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 mA, 2 sec) during contextual fear conditioning. Following a recent (1 d) or remote (28 d) retention interval all subjects were returned to the original training context to measure fear memory and/or to a novel context to measure the specificity of fear conditioning. Our results indicate rats that received two or five shocks show an "incubation"-like enhancement of fear between recent and remote retention intervals, while single-shocked animals show stable levels of context fear memory. Moreover, when fear was tested in a novel context, 1 and 2 shocked groups failed to freeze, whereas five shocked rats showed a time-dependent generalization of context memory. Stress enhancement of fear learning to a second round of conditioning was evident in all previously shocked animals. Based on these results, we conclude that the severity or number of foot shocks determines not only the level of fear memory, but also the time-dependent incubation of fear and its generalization across distinct contexts.

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 examines the impact of MI on subadult body size and nutritional status at the population, regional, and household levels among the Shuar of Amazonian Ecuador. Subjects and Methods Anthropometric data were collected between 2005 and 2014 from 2,164 Shuar (age 2-19 years) living in two geographic regions differing in general degree of MI. High-resolution household economic, lifestyle, and dietary data were collected from a subsample of 631 participants. Analyses were performed to investigate relationships between body size and year of data collection, region, and specific aspects of household MI. Results Results from temporal and regional analyses suggest that MI has a significant and overall positive impact on Shuar body size and nutritional status. However, household-level results exhibit nuanced and heterogeneous specific effects of MI underlying these overarching relationships. Conclusion This study provides novel insight into the complex socio-ecological pathways linking MI, physical growth, and health among the Shuar and other indigenous Amazonian populations.