Do Attitudes Towards the Integration of Immigrants Change Over Time? A Comparative Study of Natives,Second-Generation Immigrants and Foreign-Born Residents in Luxembourg

The aim of this paper is to investigate attitudes toward the integration of immigrants in Luxembourg—the country with the highest proportion of immigrants in Europe. First, the paper examines how attitudes toward integration (consisting of two dimensions: attitudes toward assimilation and attitudes toward multiculturalism) vary among different groups of the country’s residents, i.e. natives and residents with a migratory background. Second, it examines how these attitudes have evolved over a period of nearly ten years. The Luxembourgish European Value Study data from 1999 and 2008 are used. The results of the analyses reveal that attitudes towards the integration of immigrants differ significantly among the resident groups analysed. Native residents are more supportive of the assimilation model compared to foreign-born residents and second-generation immigrants with two foreign-born parents, whereas the latter groups score higher on the multiculturalism scale than the other groups. With respect to trends in attitudes towards integration, the assimilation model gained popularity between 1999 and 2008 among all groups, whereas only a small decrease in popularity was found with respect to preferences for multicultural integration.     

Public Responses to Community Compensation: The Importance of Prior Consultations with Local Residents

A company that wants to implement an industrial project with adverse local impacts can offer the members of the affected community compensation for bearing the burdens associated with the project. In the current study, participants evaluated such a situation from the perspective of observer. Depending on experimental condition, they learned that a company either had or had not consulted members of the affected community prior to deciding on the compensation offer. The compensation offer was either public goods compensation or individual monetary compensation. We hypothesized and found that the decision‐making process was considered fairer and the company was perceived as more concerned with the local public interest when the company had consulted local residents prior to deciding on the compensation offer. Also, the company was believed to be more concerned with the local public interest when it offered public goods compensation instead of individual monetary compensation. Perceived concern and perceived fairness predicted the perceived trustworthiness of the company, and this, in turn, predicted how participants anticipated the members of the affected community to react to the compensation offered by the company. The study thus demonstrates the importance of consultations with local residents in the process of deciding on compensation measures. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Throwing spatial light: on topological explanations in Gestalt psychology

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences - It is a well-known fact that mathematics plays a crucial role in physics; in fact, it is virtually impossible to imagine contemporary physics without it....     

Re-examination of “release-from-PI” phenomena: recall accuracy does not recover after a semantic switch

Recall accuracy decreases over successive memory trials using similar memoranda. This effect reflects proactive interference (PI) – the tendency for previously studied information to reduce recall of new information. However, recall improves if memoranda for a subsequent trial are semantically dissimilar from the previous trials. This improvement is thought to reflect a release from PI. We tested whether PI is reduced or released from the semantic category for which it had been induced by employing paradigms which featured inducement, semantic switch, and then return-to-original category epochs. Two experiments confirmed that PI was not released after various semantic switch trials (effects from d?=??0.93 to ?1.6). Combined analyses from both studies demonstrated that the number of intervening new category trials did not reduce or release PI. In fact, in all conditions recall accuracy decreased, demonstrating that PI is maintained and can increase after the new category trials. The release-from-PI account cannot accommodate these broader dynamics of PI. This account is also incongruent with evidence and theory from cognitive psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience. We propose a reintroduction-of-PI account which explains these broader PI dynamics and is consistent with the wider psychological and neurosciences.