Scholars@Duke
Dorsa Amir

Dorsa Amir

Assistant Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience
Psychology & Neuroscience

Selected Publications

Construct validity in cross-cultural, developmental research: Challenges and strategies for improvement

Journal Article Evolutionary Human Sciences · January 1, 2025 The recent expansion of cross-cultural research in the social sciences has led to increased discourse on methodological issues involved when studying culturally diverse populations. However, discussions have largely overlooked the challenges of construct v ... Full text Cite

Children as agents of cultural adaptation.

Journal Article The Behavioral and brain sciences · December 2024 The human capacity for culture is a key determinant of our success as a species. While much work has examined adults' abilities to create and transmit cultural knowledge, relatively less work has focused on the role of children (approx. 3-17 years) in this ... Full text Cite

Recalling experiences of scarcity reduces children's generosity relative to recalling abundance.

Journal Article Journal of experimental child psychology · July 2024 Does a sense of having less or more than what one needs affect one's generosity? The question of how resource access influences prosocial behavior has received much attention in studies with adults but has produced conflicting findings. To better understan ... Full text Cite

Computational signatures of inequity aversion in children across seven societies.

Journal Article Journal of experimental psychology. General · October 2023 [Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported online in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General on Aug 10 2023 (see record 2023-96713-001). In the original article, there were affiliation errors for the first and 14th a ... Full text Cite

A cost for signaling: do Hadza hunter-gatherers forgo calories to show-off in an experimental context?

Journal Article Evolution and Human Behavior · September 1, 2023 Hadza food-sharing is extremely generous and often extends to individuals outside the household. Some anthropologists have proposed that individuals, especially men, share food beyond the household in order to signal foraging skill. While correlational dat ... Full text Cite

Tokens of virtue: Replicating incentivized measures of children's prosocial behavior with online methods and virtual resources

Journal Article Cognitive Development · April 1, 2023 Desirable resources are crucial for incentivized tasks of prosocial behavior. Developmentalists have often used tangible items, such as candy or stickers, as the resources in such tasks. However, such resources are infeasible for online testing, which has ... Full text Cite

Acoustic regularities in infant-directed speech and song across cultures.

Journal Article Nature human behaviour · November 2022 When interacting with infants, humans often alter their speech and song in ways thought to support communication. Theories of human child-rearing, informed by data on vocal signalling across species, predict that such alterations should appear globally. He ... Full text Cite

Iran: amplify voices of persecuted academics.

Journal Article Nature · November 2022 Full text Cite

What is the expected human childhood? Insights from evolutionary anthropology.

Journal Article Development and psychopathology · May 2022 In psychological research, there are often assumptions about the conditions that children expect to encounter during their development. These assumptions shape prevailing ideas about the experiences that children are capable of adjusting to, and whether th ... Full text Cite

Common knowledge promotes cooperation in the threshold public goods game by reducing uncertainty

Journal Article Evolution and Human Behavior · March 1, 2022 Recent work suggests that an important cognitive mechanism promoting coordination is common knowledge—a heuristic for representing recursive mental states. Yet, we know little about how common knowledge promotes coordination. We propose that common knowled ... Full text Cite

Low prevalence of anemia among Shuar communities of Amazonian Ecuador.

Journal Article American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · January 2022 ObjectiveAnemia is an important global health challenge. We investigate anemia prevalence among Indigenous Shuar of Ecuador to expand our understanding of population-level variation, and to test hypotheses about how anemia variation is related to ... Full text Cite

Trustworthiness is distinct from generosity in children.

Journal Article Developmental psychology · August 2021 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 a ... Full text Cite

Children are more forgiving of accidental harms across development.

Journal Article Journal of experimental child psychology · May 2021 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 during early life and the features that shape forgi ... Full text Cite

The world within: Children are sensitive to internal complexity cues.

Journal Article Journal of experimental child psychology · December 2020 When reasoning about the mechanisms of complex entities, it is important to consider their internal parts. Previous research has shown that young children view "insides" as critical to how objects function. However, whether children hold specific expectati ... Full text Cite

Cross-cultural, developmental psychology: integrating approaches and key insights

Journal Article Evolution and Human Behavior · September 1, 2020 Like psychology more broadly, developmental psychology has long suffered from a narrow focus on children from WEIRD societies—or those that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. In this review, we discuss how developmental scientists ... Full text Cite

The developmental origins of risk and time preferences across diverse societies.

Journal Article Journal of experimental psychology. General · April 2020 Risk and time preferences have often been viewed as reflecting inherent traits such as impatience and self-control. Here, we offer an alternative perspective, arguing that they are flexible and environmentally informed. In Study 1, we investigated risk and ... Full text Cite

Soil-transmitted helminth infection and intestinal inflammation among the Shuar of Amazonian Ecuador.

Journal Article American journal of physical anthropology · September 2019 ObjectivesLittle research exists documenting levels of intestinal inflammation among indigenous populations where exposure to macroparasites, like soil-transmitted helminths (STHs), is common. Reduced STH exposure is hypothesized to contribute to ... Full text Cite

Measuring subjective social status in children of diverse societies.

Journal Article PloS one · January 2019 Subjective Social Status (SSS) is a robust predictor of psychological and physiological outcomes, frequently measured as self-reported placement on the MacArthur Scale of Subjective Social Status. Despite its importance, however, there are still open quest ... Full text Cite

An uncertainty management perspective on long-run impacts of adversity: The influence of childhood socioeconomic status on risk, time, and social preferences

Journal Article Journal of Experimental Social Psychology · November 1, 2018 While there has been a recent increase in focus on the role of early life socioeconomic status (SES) on preferences and decision-making, there is still debate surrounding the proper theoretical framework for understanding such effects. Some have argued tha ... Full text Cite

The Perception of Spontaneous and Volitional Laughter Across 21 Societies.

Journal Article Psychological science · September 2018 Laughter is a nonverbal vocalization occurring in every known culture, ubiquitous across all forms of human social interaction. Here, we examined whether listeners around the world, irrespective of their own native language and culture, can distinguish bet ... Full text Cite

The behavioral constellation of deprivation may be best understood as risk management.

Journal Article The Behavioral and brain sciences · January 2017 Although the authors make a compelling case that early-life deprivation leads to present orientation, we believe that such behaviors may be better understood in terms of an underlying risk-management strategy, in which those who experience such deprivation ... Full text Cite

Are empathy and concern psychologically distinct?

Journal Article Emotion (Washington, D.C.) · December 2016 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 f ... Full text Cite

Conditioning- and time-dependent increases in context fear and generalization.

Journal Article Learning & memory (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.) · July 2016 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 mem ... Full text Cite

Heterogeneous effects of market integration on sub-adult body size and nutritional status among the Shuar of Amazonian Ecuador.

Journal Article Annals of human biology · July 2016 BackgroundMarket 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 biol ... Full text Cite

A Longitudinal Assessment of Associations between Adolescent Environment, Adversity Perception, and Economic Status on Fertility and Age of Menarche.

Journal Article PloS one · January 2016 PurposePerceptions of environmental adversity and access to economic resources in adolescence can theoretically affect the timing of life history transitions and investment in reproductive effort. Here we present evidence of correlations between v ... Full text Cite

Cultural evolution need not imply group selection.

Journal Article The Behavioral and brain sciences · January 2016 Richerson et al. make a compelling case for cultural evolution. In focusing on cultural group selection, however, they neglect important individual-level accounts of cultural evolution. While scientific discourse typically links cultural evolution to group ... Full text Cite

Diurnal variation in salivary cortisol across age classes in Ache Amerindian males of Paraguay.

Journal Article American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · May 2015 ObjectivesCortisol levels exhibit a diurnal rhythm in healthy men, with peaks in the morning and troughs in the evening. Throughout age, however, this rhythm tends to flatten. This diurnal flattening has been demonstrated in a majority of industri ... Full text Cite

Boots for Achilles: progesterone's reduction of cholesterol is a second-order adaptation.

Journal Article The Quarterly review of biology · June 2013 Progesterone and cholesterol are both vital to pregnancy. Among other functions, progesterone downregulates inflammatory responses, allowing for maternal immune tolerance of the fetal allograft. Cholesterol a key component of cell membranes, is important i ... Full text Cite