Norm enforcement may be important for resolving conflicts and promoting cooperation. However, little is known about how preferred responses to norm violations vary across cultures and across domains. In a preregistered study of 57 countries (using convenience samples of 22,863 students and non-students), we measured perceptions of the appropriateness of various responses to a violation of a cooperative norm and to atypical social behaviors. Our findings highlight both cultural universals and cultural variation. We find a universal negative relation between appropriateness ratings of norm violations and appropriateness ratings of responses in the form of confrontation, social ostracism and gossip. Moreover, we find the country variation in the appropriateness of sanctions to be consistent across different norm violations but not across different sanctions. Specifically, in those countries where use of physical confrontation and social ostracism is rated as less appropriate, gossip is rated as more appropriate.

T he present research examined the developmental course of racial behaviours in childhood. It tested the hypothesis that White children's expressions of racial prejudice do not necessarily decline in middle childhood due to the development of particular cognitive skills but that instead, as argued by the socio-normative approach, children older than seven will go on expressing prejudiced attitudes under appropriate conditions. This would be explained by the presence of an anti-racism norm, along with the existence of values promoting equal rights, which impede blatant expressions of racism. In the first study 283 White children aged 6-7 and 9-10 years performed a task of resource allocation to White and Black target children in conditions of high (White interviewer was present) or low (White interviewer was absent) salience of the anti-racist norm. The 6-to 7-yearold children discriminated against the Black target in both conditions whereas older children discriminated against the Black child only when the anti-racist norm was not salient. In Study 2, 187 White children aged 6-7 and 9-10 years performed the same resource allocation task in conditions of explicit activation of similarity vs dissimilarity or egalitarian vs merit-based norms regarding race relations. Supporting the hypothesis of the role of racist or anti-racist norms on the expression of intergroup discrimination, results have again shown that 6-to 7-year-old children discriminated against the Black target in both conditions while older children presented significantly different prejudiced/nonprejudiced behaviours consistent with the activated norms. These results were discussed in terms of the need for a reanalysis of the assumptions and research results of the cognitivedevelopmental theory and of further developments in the socio-normative approach regarding the development of prejudice in childhood. L a présente recherche a examiné le cours du développement des comportements raciaux pendant l'enfance. L'étude a testé l'hypothèse que les expressions de préjugés raciaux des enfants blancs ne diminuent pas nécessairement au milieu de l'enfance à cause du développement d'habiletés cognitives particulières mais plutô t, tel qu'avancé par l'approche socio-normative, sous des conditions appropriées, les enfants de plus de 7 ans continueront à exprimer des préjugés. Ceci serait expliqué par la présence d'une norme anti-raciste ainsi que l'existence de valeurs qui promouvoient les droits égaux, ce qui empêche les expressions flagrantes de racisme. Dans la première étude, 283 enfants blancs â gés de 6-7 et de 9-10 ans ont accompli une tâ che d'allocation de ressources à des enfants-cibles blancs et noirs dans des conditions de saillance élevée (un interviewer blanc était présent) ou faible (un interviewer blanc était absent) de la norme anti-raciste. Les enfants de 6-7 ans ont #

This survey study examined the role of perceived discrimination and acculturation orientations on immigrant children's achievement and well-being in the school context. Immigrant (n = 229), immigrant descendant (n = 196), and native Portuguese children (n =168) from 4 th to 6 th grade participated in the study. Results showed the expected gap: immigrant and immigrant descendant children revealed lower school achievement than their native peers; but only immigrant, and not immigrant descendant children, reported lower levels of well-being and peer acceptance. Perceived discrimination was negatively related to school achievement, via an increased desire for culture maintenance, only among immigrant children. The indirect effects of perceived discrimination on well-being and peer acceptance were not significant. However, perceived discrimination was strongly related to lower wellbeing and acceptance, independently of the target group, suggesting that its negative association with well-being in the school context might encompass a more general process affecting both immigrant and immigrant descendant children.

This study aims to explore age prejudice, and to examine age stereotyping in children and adolescents by adopting the Stereotype Content Model (SCM) as a theoretical framework. It was hypothesised that children are socialised into adopting an ambivalent representation of old age (socialisation hypothesis) and that this cognitive bias becomes weaker in adolescence due to greater cognitive maturity (developmental hypothesis). By analysing representative data from Portugal (European Social Survey; N = 2367), it was ascertained that the ambivalent age stereotype (higher evaluations of warmth than competence for older people) is indeed a shared social representation of older people in Portuguese society. A total of 103 Portuguese children (6-10 year olds) and adolescents (11-15 year olds) were then sampled from a local school and responded to age-appropriate measures assessing age prejudice as well as age stereotypes. Contrary to previous studies, the findings do not provide evidence for the existence of age prejudice because both children and adolescents reported positive feelings towards older people. However, the socialisation hypothesis was corroborated by showing that the ambivalent old age stereotype was already present in childhood. Contrary to the stipulated developmental hypothesis, the magnitude of this cognitive bias was very similar in adolescence.

The performance of Support Vector Machines, as many other machine learning algorithms, is very sensitive to parameter tuning, mainly in real world problems. In this paper, two well known and widely used SVM implementations, Weka SMO and LIBSVM, were compared using Simulated Annealing as a parameter tuner. This approach increased significantly the classification accuracy over the Weka SMO and LIBSVM standard configuration. The paper also presents an empirical evaluation of SVM against AdaBoost and MLP, for solving the leather defect classification problem. The results obtained are very promising in successfully discriminating leather defects, with the highest overall accuracy, of 99.59%, being achieved by LIBSVM tuned with Simulated Annealing.