Citizen participation and emprowerment: The case of local environmental hazards

Local environmental hazards place millions of citizens at risk of physical, emotional, and financial harm. While the discovery of such hazards can be fundamentally disempowering for individuals and communities, few scholars have examined the dynamics of empowerment in this context. We explore the relationships among forms of empowerment, citizen participation, and local environmental hazards, and offer a model of the processes of empowerment and disempowerment appropriate to a broad range of citizen issues. On the basis of this analysis we recommend a partnership approach to community decision making that is designed both to reduce the likelihood that local environmental hazards will develop and to minimize the disempowering impact of any threats that do occur.     

国外环境心理学研究的新进展

人口过度增长和人类过度消费导致严重的环境危机,直接影响全球可持续发展。环境心理学是20世纪70年代以来在西方社会逐步兴起的一门新学科。当前,环境心理学家应更多与环境政策制定者和政府官员接触和对话,促进正确环境政策的决策和形成。同时环境心理学家应在人的环境知觉、环境压力和生活质量;环境心理学研究中的认知、动机和社会因素;可持续发展行为、生活方式和组织文化等方面加强研究与合作。.     

Act local but don’t think too global: The impact of ecological goal level on behavior

ABSTRACT

Growing awareness of humanity’s impact on the environment raises the question of how best to encourage pro-environmental actions. Numerous campaigns have been created to convince people to adopt environmentally friendly everyday behaviors, with varying success. The difficulty may be due, at least in part, to the huge gap between these small individual actions and the high-level goals, such as “saving the planet,” often used as incentives. We tested this hypothesis via four experiments. Studies 1 and 2 showed that high-level goals were less effective than low-level goals in promoting paper- and energy-saving behaviors. Study 3 showed that high-level goals engender lower perceived outcome expectancy and higher perception of cumulative effort. Study 4 showed that outcome expectancy mediates the direct effect of goal level on intention.     

Strain‐specific aggressive behavior of male mice submitted to different husbandry procedures

Severe aggression within groups of male laboratory mice can cause serious welfare problems. Previous experiments have shown that the transfer of specific olfactory cues during cage cleaning and the provision of nesting material decrease aggression and stress in group‐housed male mice. In this study, the combined effect of these husbandry procedures was tested for their long‐term effect on aggression in two strains of male mice (BALB/c and CD‐1). We used postcleaning aggressive behavior, wound counts, and testosterone levels as indicators of aggressiveness. Physiological responses to social challenge were investigated through urinary corticosterone and adrenal tyrosine‐hydroxylase measurements. Furthermore, the aggression‐modulating effects of two enrichment items (ShepherdShack/DesRes and PVC tube) were explored. Marked differences were found between the two strains. CD‐1 mice were more aggressive, had higher testosterone levels but lower corticosterone levels, and had fewer wounds than BALB/c mice. However, in neither of the two strains was long‐term enrichment with nesting material and its transfer after cage cleaning effective in lasting reduction of intermale aggression. This may be explained by the fact that aggression levels were generally low. It seems that housing mice in small, socially stable groups or keeping social disturbances to a minimum considerably modulates aggression in group‐housed male mice. Mice of both strains housed in cages enriched with nesting material had lower urinary corticosterone levels than standard‐housed mice. We therefore conclude that the long‐term provision of nesting material, including the transfer of nesting material during cage cleaning, may enhance the welfare of laboratory mice. Aggr. Behav. 29:69–80, 2003. © 2002 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

Personal and social factors that influence pro‐environmental concern and behaviour: A review

We review the personal and social influences on pro‐environmental concern and behaviour, with an emphasis on recent research. The number of these influences suggests that understanding pro‐environmental concern and behaviour is far more complex than previously thought. The influences are grouped into 18 personal and social factors. The personal factors include childhood experience, knowledge and education, personality and self‐construal, sense of control, values, political and world views, goals, felt responsibility, cognitive biases, place attachment, age, gender and chosen activities. The social factors include religion, urban–rural differences, norms, social class, proximity to problematic environmental sites and cultural and ethnic variations We also recognize that pro‐environmental behaviour often is undertaken based on none of the above influences, but because individuals have non‐environmental goals such as to save money or to improve their health. Finally, environmental outcomes that are a result of these influences undoubtedly are determined by combinations of the 18 categories. Therefore, a primary goal of researchers now should be to learn more about how these many influences moderate and mediate one another to determine pro‐environmental behaviour.     

Conceptual priming for realistic auditory scenes and for auditory words

Two experiments were conducted using both behavioral and Event-Related brain Potentials methods to examine conceptual priming effects for realistic auditory scenes and for auditory words. Prime and target sounds were presented in four stimulus combinations: Sound–Sound, Word–Sound, Sound–Word and Word–Word. Within each combination, targets were conceptually related to the prime, unrelated or ambiguous. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to judge whether the primes and targets fit together (explicit task) and in Experiment 2 they had to decide whether the target was typical or ambiguous (implicit task). In both experiments and in the four stimulus combinations, reaction times and/or error rates were longer/higher and the N400 component was larger to ambiguous targets than to conceptually related targets, thereby pointing to a common conceptual system for processing auditory scenes and linguistic stimuli in both explicit and implicit tasks. However, fine-grained analyses also revealed some differences between experiments and conditions in scalp topography and duration of the priming effects possibly reflecting differences in the integration of perceptual and cognitive attributes of linguistic and nonlinguistic sounds. These results have clear implications for the building-up of virtual environments that need to convey meaning without words.     

AFFECTED BY NATURE: A HERMENEUTICAL TRANSFORMATION OF ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS

The value‐action gap poses a considerable challenge to normative environmental ethics. Because of the wide array of empirical research results that have become available in the fields of environmental psychology, education, and anthropology, ethicists are at present able to take into account insights on what effectively motivates proenvironmental behavior. The emotional aspect apparently forms a key element within a transformational process that leads to an internalization of nature within one's identity structure. We compare these findings with studies on environmental activists, which appear to a significantly lesser degree hampered by the value‐action gap, thereby attempting to understand what provides them with the drive to act more consistently on their moral attitudes. Hermeneutics is found to play a crucial role in the processes that lead to lasting and consistent motivation toward proenvironmental behavior. An empirically informed hermeneutical approach could therefore provide a promising impetus for contemporary environmental ethics.     

Up or Down? How Culture and Color Affect Judgments

In the Mainland China stock market, an upmarket is represented by the color red, whereas a downmarket is represented by the color green. Elsewhere, including the Chinese Hong Kong stock market, the color representations are the opposite. Three studies were conducted to examine the red‐up–green‐down effect for Mainland Chinese as well as the green‐up–red‐down effect for Hong Kong people. Study 1 showed that Mainland Chinese tended to predict greater economic growth (study 1a) and higher growth in consumption trends (study 1b) when the experimental materials were presented in red than in green, whereas Hong Kong participants exhibited the opposite tendencies. Study 2 found that Mainland Chinese implicitly associated red and green with up and down, respectively; Hong Kong people, however, implicitly associated green and red with up and down, respectively. Study 3 further indicated that Mainland Chinese were more likely to predict good outcomes when scenarios were presented in red, whereas Hong Kong participants were more likely to predict good outcomes when scenarios were presented in green. These findings suggest that culturally specific environment cues could influence human prediction and judgment. Implications for judgment generally are discussed. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Risques psychosociaux et capacité de travail des travailleurs âgés : validation du VOW/QFT

Work abilities are defined as a balance between worker own characteristics and the job requirements. The VOW/QFT has been developed in Belgium in order to understand older workers work ability by taking account of the risk factors related to the job strains, and in particular the psychosocial risk factors. The validation analysis of the VOW/QFT was carried out following the proposals of Churchill paradigm (Churchill, 1979; Roussel, 2005): exploratory analysis, confirmatory analysis and correlation analysis. The factorial structure of the questionnaire appeared stable; dimensions internal consistency is high. The regression analysis showed that work ability is explained to nearly 30% by the psychosocial risk factors, and mainly by the pleasure felt at work.