Public Attitudes Toward the Use of Bioremediation to Clean Up Toxic Contamination

Bioremediation is an innovative approach to environmental management that uses microorganisms or plants to clean up toxic contamination in the environment. This research examines public attitudes toward the use of bioremediation at 2 sites in California: an urban site (Avila Beach) and a natural site (Guadalupe Dunes). At both sites, the study participants preferred excavation of the contaminated soil to bioremediation. The survey results help to explain the reasons why there is limited support for the use of bioremediation.     

Inhibiting children's memory of an interactive event: the effectiveness of a cover‐up

Children are generally more susceptible than adults to suggestive interview techniques. Children's memories of an event can be altered and added to by presenting post‐event information (PEI). What is not known is whether embedding silence about a particular scene within the PEI makes that scene less likely to be reported. Children aged 5–6 years made cakes with an agent ‘Mrs Flour’. The following day they received PEI in which a target scene from the original event was omitted, resulting in children reporting the target scene significantly less often than did controls (control= 57% and omit= 23% correct responses). There was direct evidence from the children's language that the omission led to a detriment in memory for the original scene itself. Allowing children to draw during the interview did not reduce the effect. Implications are discussed in terms of child victims and witnesses particularly regarding child sexual abuse. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

College Mothers' Academic Achievement Goals as Related to their Children's Attitudes Toward Learning

The present study considers the relationship between college mothers' academic achievement goals (both learning and performance) and the mothers' attitudes toward their children's schoolwork as well as the relationship between each of these sets of characteristics in mothers and their elementary-school-age children's attitudes about learning. Results indicate that a mother's adoption of learning goals in her college education is positively related to the endorsement of a process/indirect focus with respect to assisting and evaluating her child on academic tasks and is associated with more personal satisfaction with providing homework assistance and greater optimism concerning the benefits of such assistance. Results also suggest that college mothers with more of a learning goal orientation and/or more of a process/indirect focus have children who display a similar concern with learning and a positive attitude about homework. Mothers who adopted more of a person/product focus with respect to their child's schoolwork had children who were less likely to interpret homework and other school tasks as opportunities to learn.     

Why are there eccentricity effects in visual search? Visual and attentional hypotheses

In standard visual search experiments, observers search for a target item among distracting items. The locations of target items are generally random within the display and ignored as a factor in data analysis. Previous work has shown that targets presented near fixation are, in fact, found more efficiently than are targets presented at more peripheral locations. This paper proposes that the primary cause of this “eccentricity effect” (Carrasco, Evert, Chang, & Katz, 1995) is an attentional bias that allocates attention preferentially to central items. The first four experiments dealt with the possibility that visual, and not attentional, factors underlie the eccentricity effect. They showed that the eccentricity effect cannot be accounted for by the peripheral reduction in visual sensitivity, peripheral crowding, or cortical magnification. Experiment 5 tested the attention allocation model and also showed that RT X set size effects can be independent of eccentricity effects. Experiment 6 showed that the effective set size in a search task depends, in part, on the eccentricity of the target because observers search from fixation outward.     

Determination and Mental Causation

Yablo suggests that we can understand the possibility of mental causation by supposing that mental properties determine physical properties, in the classic sense of determination according to which red determines scarlet. Determinates and their determinables do not compete for causal relevance, so if mental and physical properties are related as determinable and determinates, they should not compete for causal relevance either. I argue that this solution won't work. I first construct a more adequate account of determination than that provided by Yablo. I then consider two common accounts of the mental, token identity theories and dispositional theories, and argue that on neither do mental and physical properties satisfy the requirements for determination.     

On the subject of homosexuality: What Freud said

The article explores Freud's writing on homosexuality, from his early hypotheses, expressed in his letters to Fleiss to his last observations in The Outline of Psychoanalysis, published in 1940 after his death. We trace the continuities as well as changes in his thinking, and have organized the paper conceptually, under the headings: 1) Bisexuality 2) Narcissism and Object choice, 3) On Normality and Pathology, and 4) The Quantitative factor and Aggression. We show that Freud was the first to confirm the existence of homosexualities, that he offers no black and white solution to the question of normality and pathology, although he contributes to the understanding of the vehemence that surrounds the subject, and that, in the considerable body of work, he has offered a rich and varied foundation for further thinking on the subject.