Social Processes in Young Children’s Developing Understanding of Fairness

The ability to understand social norms serves as an important means by which young children navigate themselves through complex social interactions. How children learn and practice these norms, especially fairness, one of the key concepts of morality and a core foundation of our society, continues to be a hot topic in the literature within developmental psychology. Although the general ontogeny of moral development has been well documented, emerging evidence suggests complex social contextual information that qualifies the developmental and cultural variances in the development of understanding. However, the lack of systemic investigation of the complex social influences on children’s fairness understanding is a pressing issue that needs to be addressed in the field. Therefore, this thesis sets out to explore how children from different age groups and cultural backgrounds understand, evaluate and apply fairness rules in their dynamic social interactions, in order to provide a more complete understanding of children’s emerging grasp of fairness and the role of social context in achieving this. The first study examined the interaction of six influences that have been shown to affect children’s fairness allocations: three structural factors (age, gender and culture: the UK vs China) and three contextual manipulations (whether equal allocation incurred a cost whether a trial involved competition, or was with a friend or an unknown peer). The data suggest that we need to take into account the interactions between these variables and the paper develops a dynamic model to describe this complexity in children’s fairness understanding. The statistical interactions revealed the complexity of social influences on children’s fairness allocation, specifically older Chinese females were more likely to apply the fairness principle across different contexts than children in other age and cultural groups. At the same time whether being fair incurred a cost to the child was found to be important. This influence was captured in a Dynamic Cost Model to account for how children balance of self-interest and principles of normativity. The second study capitalised on the first study and looked beyond these behavioural data to further examine children’s justifications of their allocations in order to identify the underlying principles that guided children’s distributions. The diversity of children’s justifications that was found in the second study provided clear and direct evidence to support our first study. Children’s fairness considerations changed systematically in response to the context of the allocations. The third study focused on one particular social factor, authority, that emerged frequently in children’s responses when they allocated resources, to analyse how social norms are developed from simple imitation to the implementation of specific principles based on children’s own understanding. The results from the third study suggest that despite the finding that more acceptance was given to an allocator with higher authority, children questioned an authority’s legitimacy when they made unequal distributions. This was especially the case when they were treated disadvantageously: normative related thinking was provoked immediately. Children’s social understanding ability, often termed as social understanding or ‘theory of mind (ToM)’, influence children’s fairness development informed the final research question of this thesis. An under-investigated age group, two-year-olds was included in the sample to assess children’s judgements along with their emotional responses to three types of distribution (fair, advantageous and disadvantageous inequality) in relation to multiple aspects of ToM abilities. The fourth study reported a positive predictive effect of social understanding on children’s fairness understanding, and that the emotional response from young children was a meaningful indicator of their complex evaluations regarding fairness allocations. The findings of this thesis suggest that social contexts heavily affect children’s fairness understanding and behaviour. These provide a medium in which developmental stage and cultural background interact. Children’s fairness development is the process of weighing self-interest and these dynamic social pressures

Janus monolayers of transition metal dichalcogenides.

Structural symmetry-breaking plays a crucial role in determining the electronic band structures of two-dimensional materials. Tremendous efforts have been devoted to breaking the in-plane symmetry of graphene with electric fields on AB-stacked bilayers or stacked van der Waals heterostructures. In contrast, transition metal dichalcogenide monolayers are semiconductors with intrinsic in-plane asymmetry, leading to direct electronic bandgaps, distinctive optical properties and great potential in optoelectronics. Apart from their in-plane inversion asymmetry, an additional degree of freedom allowing spin manipulation can be induced by breaking the out-of-plane mirror symmetry with external electric fields or, as theoretically proposed, with an asymmetric out-of-plane structural configuration. Here, we report a synthetic strategy to grow Janus monolayers of transition metal dichalcogenides breaking the out-of-plane structural symmetry. In particular, based on a MoS2 monolayer, we fully replace the top-layer S with Se atoms. We confirm the Janus structure of MoSSe directly by means of scanning transmission electron microscopy and energy-dependent X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, and prove the existence of vertical dipoles by second harmonic generation and piezoresponse force microscopy measurements

What does the Strange Stories test measure?:Developmental and within-test variation

Background Happé’s (1994) Strange Stories have been widely used to assess advanced theory of mind understanding in several clinical populations, but recent analyses have cast doubt on the links between it and other related measures of this skill. Methods This study tested 210 Pakistani and 46 British children to assess the developmental trajectory of performance across a 6-year age span in the test, and also to explore differences between and within the four most used sub-tests (Misunderstanding, Persuasion, White Lies and Double Bluff). Results There were significant developmental differences in children’s overall understanding of the Stories and between not only the four sub-tests but also individual questions purporting to assess the same construct. Partial correlations, controlling for the age (in months) and SES produced inconsistent correlations between stories assessing the same construct (e.g. Double Bluff stories). Factor analysis also revealed two factors and for the two sub-tests (double bluff and misunderstanding), each story loaded onto a separate factor, contrasting the assumption that the Strange Stories assess the same underlying ability. Moreover, GLMM analyses showed that the model with two main effects (age and SES) fitted the best and age emerged as a major predictor. Post hoc analyses showed that performance on White lie (used as a baseline) was higher than on Persuasion and Double Bluff. Similar, but not identical patterns were found in a comparison between the six- and eight-year-olds in the two cultures, with children in the UK outperforming those in Pakistan. Conclusion The results suggest that the test is less homogeneous than has been assumed. Relationships with other measures and diagnoses might only apply to subsets of the questions. The need for standardization is clear

Janus monolayers of transition metal dichalcogenides.

Structural symmetry-breaking plays a crucial role in determining the electronic band structures of two-dimensional materials. Tremendous efforts have been devoted to breaking the in-plane symmetry of graphene with electric fields on AB-stacked bilayers or stacked van der Waals heterostructures. In contrast, transition metal dichalcogenide monolayers are semiconductors with intrinsic in-plane asymmetry, leading to direct electronic bandgaps, distinctive optical properties and great potential in optoelectronics. Apart from their in-plane inversion asymmetry, an additional degree of freedom allowing spin manipulation can be induced by breaking the out-of-plane mirror symmetry with external electric fields or, as theoretically proposed, with an asymmetric out-of-plane structural configuration. Here, we report a synthetic strategy to grow Janus monolayers of transition metal dichalcogenides breaking the out-of-plane structural symmetry. In particular, based on a MoS2 monolayer, we fully replace the top-layer S with Se atoms. We confirm the Janus structure of MoSSe directly by means of scanning transmission electron microscopy and energy-dependent X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, and prove the existence of vertical dipoles by second harmonic generation and piezoresponse force microscopy measurements

Combined Large-N Seismic Arrays and DAS Fiber Optic Cables across the Hengill Geothermal Field, Iceland

From June to August 2021, we deployed a dense seismic nodal network across the Hengill geothermal area in southwest Iceland to image and characterize faults and high-temperature zones at high resolution. The nodal network comprised 498 geophone nodes spread across the northern Nesjavellir and southern Hverahlíð geothermal fields and was complemented by an existing permanent and temporary backbone seismic network of a total of 44 short-period and broadband stations. In addition, we recorded distributed acoustic sensing data along two fiber optic telecommunication cables near the Nesjavellir geothermal power plant with commercial interrogators. During the time of deployment, a vibroseis survey took place around the Nesjavellir power plant. Here, we describe the network and the recorded datasets. Furthermore, we show some initial results that indicate a high data quality and highlight the potential of the seismic records for various follow up studies, such as high-resolution event location to delineate faults and body- and surface-wave tomographies to image the subsurface velocity structure in great detail.ISSN:0895-0695ISSN:1938-205