Human Cloning in Film: Horror,Ambivalence, Hope

Abstract

Fictional filmic representations of human cloning have shifted in relation to the 1997 announcement of the birth of Dolly the cloned sheep, and since therapeutic human cloning became a scientific practice in the early twentieth century. The operation and detail of these shifts can be seen through an analysis of the films The Island and Aeon Flux . These films provide a site for the examination of how these changes in human cloning from fiction to practice, and from horror to hope, have been represented and imagined, and how these distinctions have operated visually in fiction, and in relation to genre.     

Self-ordered pointing as a test of working memory in typically developing children

The self-ordered pointing test (SOPT; Petrides & Milner, 1982 Petrides, M. and Milner, B. 1982. Deficits on subject-ordered tasks after frontal- and temporal-lobe lesions in man. Neuropsychologia, 20(3): 249–262. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) is a test of non-spatial executive working memory requiring the ability to generate and monitor a sequence of responses. Although used with developmental clinical populations there are few normative data against which to compare atypical performance. Typically developing children (5–11 years) and young adults performed two versions of the SOPT, one using pictures of familiar objects and the other hard-to-verbalise abstract designs. Performance improved with age but the children did not reach adult levels of performance. Participants of all ages found the object condition easier than the abstract condition, suggesting that verbal processes are utilised by the SOPT. However, performance on the task was largely independent from verbal and nonverbal cognitive ability. Overall the results suggest that the SOPT is a sensitive measure of executive working memory.     

Sources and Types of Confidence Identified by World Class Sport Performers

This study identified the sources and types of confidence salient to 14 (7 male, 7 female) successful World Class athletes. Nine sources of confidence were identified: Preparation, performance accomplishments, coaching, innate factors, social support, experience, competitive advantage, self-awareness, and trust. A testament to the multi-dimensional nature of sport confidence, six types of sport confidence were also identified: skill execution, achievement, physical factors, psychological factors, superiority to opposition, and tactical awareness. Gender was related to both the sources of confidence and the subsequent types of confidence experienced by the athletes. For example, females placed more importance on good personal performances than males who derived confidence from winning. Results were discussed in the context of previous sport confidence literature and implications for sport psychology and coaching practices were drawn.     

Fooled by the brain: Re-examining the influence of neuroimages

A series of highly-cited experiments published in 2008 demonstrated a biasing effect of neuroimages on lay perceptions of scientific research. More recent work, however, has questioned this bias, particularly within legal contexts in which neuroscientific evidence is proffered by one of the parties. The present research moves away from the legal framework and describes five experiments that re-examine this effect. Experiments 1 through 4 present conceptual and direct replications of some of the original 2008 experiments, and find no evidence of a neuroimage bias. A fifth experiment is reported that confirms that, when laypeople are allowed multiple points of reference (e.g., when directly comparing neuroimagery to other graphical depictions of neurological data), a neuroimage bias can be observed. Together these results suggest that, under the right conditions, a neuroimage might be able to bias judgments of scientific information, but the scope of this effect may be limited to certain contexts.     

Acceptance of Evolution and Support for Teaching Creationism in Public Schools: The Conditional Impact of Educational Attainment

Public acceptance of evolution remains low in the United States relative to other Western countries. Although advocates for the scientific community often highlight the need for improved education to change public opinion, analyses of data from a national sample of American adults indicate that the effects of educational attainment on attitudes toward evolution and creationism are uneven and contingent upon religious identity. Consequently, higher education will only shift public attitudes toward evolution and away from support for teaching creationism in public schools for those who take non‐“literalist” interpretive stances on the Bible, or to the extent that it leads to fewer people with literalist religious identities.     

Memory for Frequency of Bizarre and Common Stimuli: Limitations of the Automaticity Hypothesis

In 2 experiments, the influence of intention to process frequency on accuracy of memory for frequency of bizarre and common sentences was investigated. The results from multiple regression analyses indicated that intentional processing increased the accuracy of frequency judgments when memory for frequency was tested after a 2-min (Experiment 1) and after a 48-hr (Experiment 2) retention interval. Furthermore, the results of Experiment 2 indicated that unintentional processors tended to overestimate frequencies of bizarre relative to common items after a delay. The implications of the results are discussed with regard to L. Hasher and R. T. Zacks's (1984) automaticity hypothesis, human performance, and the accuracy of judgments of frequency of occurrence of unusual events.     

Toward Meaningful Noise Research

The present review considers a series of studies of noise conducted in collaboration with Dr. Michel Loeb. This review attempts to provide a theoretical perspective as well as to summarize the most important findings of those studies. The work reviewed shows that noise effects interact with other variables, such that a noise effect on one sex is reversed for the other, and is also reversed at different times of the day. A second experiment confirmed this finding with a different arithmetic task. Further work indicated parallels between noise and fatigue, with aftereffects depending upon both work and noise. The final experiment repeated some of these findings with a different task battery of information processing tasks while showing that noise effects further depend on the meaningfulness of the noise background.     

The Inventory of Children's Individual Differences: Development and Validation of a Short Version

The development of programmed, actuarial interpretation of personality tests, especially the MMPI, is discussed. The presentation seeks to present a synoptic overview of the topic, including its more important trends, apparent present status, and possible consequences. Several commercially available systems are described, and an example of the output of each of three of them, in interpreting the same MMPI protocol, is presented for comparative illustration.     

Further Observations on Group Judgments of Lifted Weights

With use of a sample of five kibbutzim and subjects from three cities in Israel, the hypothesis investigated was that the adults in the kibbutz would obtain higher scores than the other subjects in their perceptions of the past and present on the Self-Anchoring Striving Scale. These responses were compared to those of two groups from the United States, Jewish and non-Jewish. The total sample consisted of 160 Ss with 40 Ss in each of the four groups. It was also hypothesized that there would be less discrepancy in the perceptions of the future as compared to the past and present between Israeli and United States Ss. The hypotheses presented were supported by the data.

The kibbutz sample in expressing hopes and aspirations had a significantly higher number of Ss that desired world peace than the other three samples. The Israeli city sample in responding to aspirations had a significantly greater number of responses than the kibbutz for the following categories: having a good job, owning a house, and possessing wealth.

The Israeli city sample compared to the kibbutz had a significantly higher number of responses to a fear of a deterioration in the standard of living. The rank order correlation of the verbal responses indicated that the responses of the American Jewish group were more similar to both Israeli groups than the United States non-Jewish group.