Reciprocal cortico-amygdala connections regulate prosocial and selfish choices in mice.

Decisions that favor one's own interest versus the interest of another individual depend on context and the relationships between individuals. The neurobiology underlying selfish choices or choices that benefit others is not understood. We developed a two-choice social decision-making task in which mice can decide whether to share a reward with their conspecifics. Preference for altruistic choices was modulated by familiarity, sex, social contact, hunger, hierarchical status and emotional state matching. Fiber photometry recordings and chemogenetic manipulations demonstrated that basolateral amygdala (BLA) neurons are involved in the establishment of prosocial decisions. In particular, BLA neurons projecting to the prelimbic (PL) region of the prefrontal cortex mediated the development of a preference for altruistic choices, whereas PL projections to the BLA modulated self-interest motives for decision-making. This provides a neurobiological model of altruistic and selfish choices with relevance to pathologies associated with dysfunctions in social decision-making.

Gendered Diverging Destinies: Changing Family Structures and the Reproduction of Educational Inequalities Among Sons and Daughters in the United States.

The prevalence of nontraditional family structures has increased over time, particularly among socioeconomically disadvantaged families. Because children's socioeconomic attainments are positively associated with growing up in a two-parent household, changing family structures are considered to have strengthened the reproduction of social inequalities across generations. However, several studies have shown that childhood family structure relates differently to educational outcomes for sons than for daughters. Therefore, we ask whether there are gender differences in the extent to which changing family structures have contributed to the college attainment gap between children from lower and higher socioeconomic backgrounds. We use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 and 1997 cohorts to estimate extended Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition models that take into account cross-cohort changes in the prevalence of family structures and heterogeneity in the effects of childhood family structure on college attainment. We find that the argument that changes in family structures contributed to diverging destinies in college attainment holds for daughters but not for sons. This result is due to the different changes over time in the effects of childhood family structure by gender and socioeconomic background.

Soccer Scores, Short-Term Mood and Fertility.

Previous research has shown that seemingly irrelevant events such as unexpected outcomes in sporting events can affect mood and have relevant consequences for episodes of crime and violence, investing behavior and political preferences. In this article, we test whether mood shocks associated with unexpected results in soccer matches in Spain affect fertility. We use data on betting odds and actual scores to define mood shocks and link them to births by month and province in Spain, between 2001 and 2015. We find that unexpected losses of local teams lead to a small decrease in the number of births nine months thereafter. The effect is larger for more unexpected losses, in those provinces with the largest amount of support for the local team and robust to a number of placebo tests. We argue that these results are consistent with the gain-loss asymmetry predicted by prospect theory.

Social inequality and the risk of living in a nursing home: implications for the COVID-19 pandemic.

Across EU countries, all available evidence suggests that the number of deaths linked to COVID-19 among those living in nursing homes has been extremely high. However, it is largely unknown to what extent income and education affect the probability of being a nursing home resident. If the probability of residing in a nursing home is stratified by socio-economic status, under the current COVID-19 pandemic socio-economic inequality in the probability of living in a nursing home could contribute to enlarge socio-economic inequalities in the risk of mortality with COVID-19. In this article, we investigate whether there are income and educational differences in the likelihood of being a resident in a nursing home across 12 European countries. We use SHARE data (waves 5-7) and compute logistic regression models for rare events. We find that low-educated individuals and those having household income below the national median are more likely to live in a nursing home. This general pattern holds across all the European countries considered. However, there is considerable uncertainty in our estimates due to a small sample size, and firm conclusions on how the effect of socio-economic characteristics varies across countries cannot be drawn. Still, there is some indication that educational and income differences are the largest in the Scandinavian countries (Denmark and Sweden) and the Netherlands, while the smallest ones are found in Italy, with the remaining countries laying in between.

Same-Sex Parents and Children's School Progress: An Association That Disappeared Over Time.

Research is divided as to whether children living in same-sex parent families achieve different outcomes compared with their peers. In this article, we improve on earlier estimates of such differences and subsequently study whether and why the association between parental union sex composition and children's school progress changed over time. Data from the American Community Survey waves 2008-2015 (N = 1,952,490 including 7,792 children living with a same-sex couple) indicate that children living with same-sex couples were historically more likely to be behind in school but that this association disappeared over time. Changes in socioeconomic characteristics of same-sex couples played a minor role. In 2008, it was only in areas with unfavorable laws and attitudes toward same-sex couples that children living with same-sex couples were more likely to be behind in school. This was especially the case for adopted children. In more recent periods, no effect of parental union sex composition on school progress is observed within any area or among any group studied. Based on where and when these changes took place, it is suggested that changing attitudes toward same-sex couples might have played an important role in equalizing school progress across groups.

Explaining Conflicting Results in Research on the Heterogeneous Effects of Parental Separation on Children's Educational Attainment According to Social Background.

In recent years, researchers have become increasingly interested in how the effects of parental separation on children's educational attainment vary with social background. On the one hand, parents with more resources might be better able to prevent possible adverse events like separation to affect their children's outcomes. On the other hand, children from higher social backgrounds might have more resources to lose from a parental separation. A wide range of empirical studies on the issue have come to inconsistent conclusions, with support found for both perspectives. The aim of this paper is to monitor the influence of methodological and operational choices on the different results observed across studies. We focus on aspects such as the operationalization of key variables, the measurement of inequality in absolute and relative terms and the different strategies used to address endogeneity. We study the effects of parental separation on educational attainment for a cohort of British children born in 1970 and find that conclusions change depending on whether social background is measured using the mother's or father's characteristics and whether relative or absolute differences between groups are considered. Results are relatively insensitive to the operationalization of dependent variables and the treatment of missing data. When using data from Understanding Society instead of the British Cohort Study, results also did not change. We reflect on how these findings can explain the contradictory results from earlier studies on the topic, and how heterogeneity in the effects of parental separation by socio-economic background should be interpreted.

Non-intact families and diverging educational destinies: A decomposition analysis for Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States.

We examine whether the presence of non-intact families in society is related to increased inequality in educational attainment according to social background, as suggested by the 'diverging destinies' thesis. We analyze four countries, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States, that differ in the prevalence of non-intact families and in the strength of the negative association between growing up in a non-intact family and children's educational attainment. We use a Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition approach to calculate a 'counterfactual' estimate of differences in educational attainment between socioeconomically advantaged and disadvantaged children in the hypothetical absence of non-intact families. Contrary to the diverging destinies thesis, we find little differences between actual and 'counterfactual' levels of inequality in educational attainment in all four countries. Whereas growing-up in a non-intact family affects the individual chances of educational attainment, the overall contribution of non-intact families to aggregate levels of social background inequality appears minimal.

Family Dynamics and Child Outcomes: An Overview of Research and Open Questions.

Previous research has documented that children who do not live with both biological parents fare somewhat worse on a variety of outcomes than those who do. In this article, which is the introduction to the Special Issue on "Family dynamics and children's well-being and life chances in Europe," we refine this picture by identifying variation in this conclusion depending on the family transitions and subpopulations studied. We start by discussing the general evidence accumulated for parental separation and ask whether the same picture emerges from research on other family transitions and structures. Subsequently, we review studies that have aimed to deal with endogeneity and discuss whether issues of causality challenge the general picture of family transitions lowering child well-being. Finally, we discuss whether previous evidence finds effects of family transitions on child outcomes to differ between children from different socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds, and across countries and time-periods studied. Each of the subsequent articles in this Special Issue contributes to these issues. Two articles provide evidence on how several less often studied family forms relate to child outcomes in the European context. Two other articles in this Special Issue contribute by resolving several key questions in research on variation in the consequences of parental separation by socioeconomic and immigrant background, two areas of research that have produced conflicting results so far.

Is There a New Service Proletariat? Post-industrial Employment Growth and Social Inequality in Spain.

In Spain the absolute number of employed persons has increased from about 12,300,000 persons in 1994 to 19,300,000 at the end of 2005. In the same period, the number of immigrants has increased from about 500,000 to more than 4 million. The aim of this paper is to analyse the implications of these changes for social inequality. In particular, we investigate whether a new type of unskilled service class is likely to emerge as a distinct social class. We address this issue by means of three more specific research questions. The first one refers to the pattern of changes in the employment structure by occupational class: has the mentioned employment growth implied an expansion of the swelling service proletariat? The other two questions refer to the issue of demographic class formation: which is the composition of the class structure by gender and country of origin? And, are unskilled service occupations stop-gaps springboards towards better positions, or are they long-term traps? We answer these questions by means of a dynamic analysis of the panel data of the Spanish Labour Force Surveys (SLFS). We study trends over time in the class structure and, then, analyse upward mobility chances and the risk of falling into unemployment from unskilled occupations from year t to year t + 1.