Near-misses sting: As adults, we intuitively understand that someone who just missed a desirable outcome (near-miss) feels worse than someone who missed by a far margin (far-miss). What cognitive capacities support these intuitions, and how do they emerge in early childhood? We presented adults (n=42) and six- to eight-year-olds (n=91; pre-registered) with various near-miss scenarios. We found that (1) adults generally infer that a near-miss character would feel worse than a far-miss character, (2) yet their inferences vary depending on the context, and (3) children show a strikingly different pattern from adults, robustly choosing the far-miss character as feeling worse. The tendency to judge the near-miss character as feeling worse increased with age, but even 8-year-olds were still below chance. These patterns raise the possibility that young children start with a distance-based bias that gradually gets replaced by adult-like inferences that involve counterfactual reasoning.

Unlabelled

Breast, ovarian, and prostate cancers are hormone-related and may have a shared genetic basis, but this has not been investigated systematically by genome-wide association (GWA) studies. Meta-analyses combining the largest GWA meta-analysis data sets for these cancers totaling 112,349 cases and 116,421 controls of European ancestry, all together and in pairs, identified at P < 10(-8) seven new cross-cancer loci: three associated with susceptibility to all three cancers (rs17041869/2q13/BCL2L11; rs7937840/11q12/INCENP; rs1469713/19p13/GATAD2A), two breast and ovarian cancer risk loci (rs200182588/9q31/SMC2; rs8037137/15q26/RCCD1), and two breast and prostate cancer risk loci (rs5013329/1p34/NSUN4; rs9375701/6q23/L3MBTL3). Index variants in five additional regions previously associated with only one cancer also showed clear association with a second cancer type. Cell-type-specific expression quantitative trait locus and enhancer-gene interaction annotations suggested target genes with potential cross-cancer roles at the new loci. Pathway analysis revealed significant enrichment of death receptor signaling genes near loci with P < 10(-5) in the three-cancer meta-analysis.

Significance

We demonstrate that combining large-scale GWA meta-analysis findings across cancer types can identify completely new risk loci common to breast, ovarian, and prostate cancers. We show that the identification of such cross-cancer risk loci has the potential to shed new light on the shared biology underlying these hormone-related cancers. Cancer Discov; 6(9); 1052-67. ©2016 AACR.This article is highlighted in the In This Issue feature, p. 932.