Previously, research on wishful thinking has found that desires bias older children's and adults' predictions during probabilistic reasoning tasks. In this article, we explore wishful thinking in children aged 3- to 10-years-old. Do young children learn to be wishful thinkers? Or do they begin with a wishful thinking bias that is gradually overturned during development? Across five experiments, we compare low- and middle-income United States and Peruvian 3- to 10-year-old children (N = 682). Children were asked to make predictions during games of chance. Across experiments, preschool-aged children from all backgrounds consistently displayed a strong wishful thinking bias. However, the bias declined with age.

Participation in clinical research trials has been hypothesized to facilitate the adoption of evidence-based practices by community-based substance abuse treatment providers. However, little empirical information is available regarding the methodological and collaborative characteristics of research trials that may affect the chances of adoption. The current paper describes the development of the Survey of Practiced Research Efforts to Aid Dissemination (SPREAD), a standardized instrument designed to measure characteristics of clinical trials that may facilitate adoption. The survey was administered to a sample of 33 community-based research trials from the top four impact factor journals of 2007. Overall, methodological quality was high and levels of collaboration were low, with little involvement of community-based clinic staff in most study related activities. Future research to determine the predictive validity of the SPREAD instrument on post-trial adoption of studies interventions in clinical research is encouraged. © 2014 Springer Science+Business Media New York.

This study explores the relationship between beliefs aboutself-control and the ability to exercise self-control in 4- to 6-year-old children. Sixty-eight children were asked a series ofquestions to gauge whether they believed that they couldfreely choose to act against their desires or inhibit themselvesfrom performing desired actions. Children were also asked toprovide qualitative explanations for why they could or couldnot exercise free will, and to complete two inhibitory controltasks: forbidden toy and day/night. Choice responses werenegatively correlated with performance on the forbidden toytask, when children performed that task first. There was also anegative correlation between a belief in an internal locus ofcontrol, and success on the forbidden toy measure. Refrainingfrom touching a forbidden toy appears to be correlated to lessbelief in free will. Though this may appear counter-intuitive,it is consistent with cross-cultural research.

Extensive research has explored the ability of young children to learn about the causal structure of the world from patterns of evidence. These studies, however, have been conducted with middle-class samples from North America and Europe. In the present study, low-income Peruvian 4- and 5-year-olds and adults, low-income U.S. 4- and 5-year-olds in Head Start programs, and middle-class children from the United States participated in a causal learning task (N = 435). Consistent with previous studies, children learned both specific causal relations and more abstract causal principles across culture and socioeconomic status (SES). The Peruvian children and adults generally performed like middle-class U.S. children and adults, but the low-SES U.S. children showed some differences.