The point of an apology-to express regret and repair relationships-is lost because children may dislike the apologizer even more after the insincere apology than before.

A new study looks at whether children can tell apart willingly given and forced expressions of regret-and they do. The findings suggest that exploring ways to help your child learn to have empathy (同情) for the victim (受害者), thus making sure of a sincere apology, is more   helpful than immediately forcing him to say “I’m sorry”。

Smith and co-workers looked at how children aged 4-9 viewed three types of apologies among kids of the same age: unprompted (自发的) apologies, prompted but willingly given apologies, and forced apologies. They found that kids viewed willing apologies the same, whether prompted or unprompted by adults. But the forced apologies weren’t seen as effective, especially by the 7-to 9-year-olds, Smith says.

All children thought the wrongdoers felt worse after the apology than before, but the 7-to 9-year-old children thought the forced apologizers’ bad feelings were rooted in self-interest (concern about punishment, for example),rather than regret. Children of all ages also thought the victims felt better after receiving a wiling apology, but they saw the receivers of the forced apology as feeling worse than the receivers of the willing apologies.

How can parents help their young children respond with empathy after they’ve upset another person, and deliver a willing apology? “When your child is calm, help him/her see how the other person is feeling, and why,” Smith says. “An apology is one way to do it, but there are lots of other ways. Research shows that even preschoolers value it when a wrongdoer makes amends (补偿) with action. Sometimes this is more powerful than words.”

GENETIC testing cannot tell teachers anything useful about an individual pupil’s educational achievement. That is the conclusion of a study that looked at how well so-called polygenic scores for education predict a person’s educational achievements, based on a long-term study of thousands of people in the UK. “Some people with a very low genetic score are very high performers at age 16. Some are even in the top 3 percent,” says Tim Morris at the University of Bristol, UK.

And while Morris expects the accuracy of polygenic scores for educational achievements to improve, he doesn’t think they will ever be good enough to predict how well an individual will do. Even relatively simple qualities such as height are influenced by thousands of genetic variants, each of which may only have a tiny effect. It has been claimed that polygenic scores can be used to make useful predictions, such as a person’s likelihood of developing various diseases. One company is even offering embryo screening (screening of an unborn baby in the very stages of development) based on polygenic scores for disease risk.

Some researchers - notably Robert Plomin of King’s College London - think that schools should start using polygenic scores for educational achievement. In most cases, the scores may reflect qualities such as persistence as well as intelligence.

To assess the usefulness of polygenic scores in education, Morris and his colleagues calculated them for 8,000 people in Bristol who are part of a long-term study known as the Children of the 90s. The participants’ genomes have been queued and their academic results are available to researchers. Among other things, the team found a correlation of 0.4 between a person’s polygenic score and their exam results at age 16. But there would need to be a correlation of at least 0.8 to make useful predictions about individuals, says Morris.

Plomin, however, argues that the results support his opinion. “A correlation of 0.4 makes it the strongest polygenic predictor in the behavioural sciences,” says Plomin. “It’s so much stronger than a lot of other things we base decisions on. So it’s a very big finding.”

Morris says schools already have access to other predictors that are more accurate, such as a pupil’s earlier test results. Looking at parents’ educational achievements is also a better predictor of a pupil’s academic results than studying their genome, his results show. Providing teachers with an extra predictor based on genetics would just confuse matters, says Morris, and the cost cannot be justified.