Slim Futures and the Fat Pill: Civic Imaginations of Innovation and Governance in an Engagement Setting

Innovation politics is seen as an ever more central area of public policy, and as a key means for shaping societal futures. Particularly in Europe, with its history of controversial public debates about innovations, the idea that scientific progress is automatically equated with societal progress seems hard to sustain. Broader public participation within techno-scientific governance seems necessary; though who is to participate in which form often remains unclear. Increasingly, when the innovation process is discussed in both policy and academia, the question of when public engagement should take place in the innovation process is addressed using common models such as ‘upstream engagement’. However, these discussions about public engagement often assume a top-down approach, and pay little attention to citizens' perspectives. To address this gap in the literature, this article will ask the following questions: what tacit understandings of techno-scientific innovation and governance do citizens have; and how do they relate their understandings of the form, structure and dynamics of these innovation processes to their visions of governance and participation? How do specific cultural forms of conceptualising innovation open up or close down particular possibilities of governance and public participation, hence privileging the involvement of certain actors and not others? To address these questions, we analyse the discussions in a long-term public engagement setting involving both genome scientists and citizens in Austria.     

The impact of culture on physiological processes of emotion regulation: a comparison of US and Chinese preschoolers

Cognitive determinants of emotion regulation, such as effortful control, have been hypothesized to modulate young children's physiological response to emotional stress. It is unknown, however, whether this model of emotion regulation generalizes across Western and non‐Western cultures. The current study examined the relation between both behavioral and questionnaire measures of effortful control and densely sampled, stress‐induced cortisol trajectories in U.S. and Chinese preschoolers. Participants were 3‐ to 5‐ year‐old children recruited from the United States (N = 57) and Beijing, China (N = 60). Consistent with our hypothesis, U.S. children showed a significant negative relation between maternal‐rated inhibitory control and both cortisol reactivity and recovery. However, this was not replicated in the Chinese sample. Children in China showed a significant positive relation between maternal‐rated attentional focusing and cortisol reactivity that was not seen in the U.S. Results suggest that children who reside in Western and non‐Western cultures have different predictors of their emotion‐related stress response.     

Consequences of ‘tiger’ parenting: a cross‐cultural study of maternal psychological control and children's cortisol stress response

Parenting strategies involving psychological control are associated with increased adjustment problems in children. However, no research has examined the extent to which culture and psychological control predict children's stress physiology. We examine cultural differences in maternal psychological control and its associations with children's cortisol. Chinese (N = 59) and American (N = 45) mother‐child dyads participated in the study. Mothers reported on psychological control. Children's cortisol was collected during a stressor and two indices of Area Under the Curve (AUC) were computed: AUCg which accounts for total output, and AUCi, which captures reactivity. Results indicate that Chinese mothers reported higher levels of psychological control and Chinese children had higher levels of AUCg than their American counterparts. Across both cultures, psychological control was significantly associated with increased cortisol levels as indexed by AUCg. There were no associations for AUCi. Finally, mediation analyses demonstrated that psychological control fully explained cultural differences in children's cortisol stress response as indexed by AUCg.     

Inhibitory Control and Harsh Discipline as Predictors of Externalizing Problems in Young Children: A Comparative Study of U.S., Chinese,and Japanese Preschoolers

We examined associations between child inhibitory control, harsh parental discipline and externalizing problems in 120 4 year-old boys and girls in the US, China, and Japan. Individual differences in children’s inhibitory control abilities, assessed using behavioral tasks and maternal ratings, were related to child externalizing problems reported by mothers. As predicted, both child inhibitory control and maternal harsh discipline made significant contributions to child externalizing problems in all three countries. Across countries, child inhibitory control and maternal harsh discipline made significant independent contributions to early externalizing problems, suggesting an additive model of association. Our findings supported the cross-cultural generalizability of child inhibitory control and parental harsh punishment as key contributors to disruptive behavior in young children.     

(Re)assembling Natures,Cultures, and (Nano)technologies in Public Engagement

Abstract

Practices of ordering are powerful means of giving structure to people's lives and providing a sense of control. The analysis of three episodes from discussion groups on nanotechnology in Austria shows that citizens evaluate new technologies with regard to how they intersect with, support, or disturb existing orders. The concept of discursive assemblages serves as a lens for recognising the non-fixed character of the discursive process, while still allowing the analyst to identify how specific elements, such as conceptions of nature, culture, and technology, are (re)assembled at particular moments. Each of the three episodes represents a specific way of creating and negotiating assemblages: the first case demonstrates how discussants collectively discuss a nature–technology hybrid (nano-bamboo socks) against the backdrop of a highly valued ideal of keeping ‘the natural’ and ‘the technological’ separate; the second episode exemplifies a clash of two assemblages as participants argued for or against the application of nanotechnology in food products; and the third example illustrates the process of collective experimentation with different assemblages to make sense of a highly futuristic nanochip for brain enhancement. Together the episodes demonstrate that participants in public engagement settings do not address nanotechnology as a simple question of choice between acceptance and rejection but rather engage in processes of care regarding how a society might develop when technological innovations such as nanotechnology threaten to blur existing boundaries and orders, such as the distinction between nature and culture.     

Hypothalamic Pituitary Adrenal Axis Functioning in Reactive and Proactive Aggression in Children

The purpose of this study was to examine the association between hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA-axis) reactivity and proactive and reactive aggression in pre-pubertal children. After a 30-min controlled base line period, 73 7-year-old children (40 males and 33 females) were randomly assigned to one of two experimental tasks designed to elicit fear (N = 33) or frustration (N = 32), or a validity check condition (N = 8). This was followed by a 60-min controlled regulation phase. A total of 17 saliva samples for cortisol analysis were collected including 12 post-stress samples at 5-min intervals. Reactive and proactive aggression levels were assessed via the teacher-completed Aggression Behavior Teacher Checklist (Dodge and Coie, J Pers Soc Psychol, 53(6), 1146–1158, 1987). Reactive aggression significantly predicted total and peak post-stress cortisol regardless of stress modality. Proactive aggression was not a predictor of any cortisol index. Examination of pure reactive, proactive, combined, or non-aggressive children indicated that reactive aggressive children had higher cortisol reactivity than proactive and non-aggressive children. Our data suggest that while an overactive HPA-axis response to stress is associated with reactive aggression, stress induced HPA-axis variability does not seem to be related to proactive aggression.     

Individual differences in cortisol responses to fear and frustration during middle childhood

The purpose of this study was to examine individual differences in the activation and regulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis in prepubertal children after exposure to two different stress modalities and to evaluate the utility of an individual differences approach to the examination of HPA axis functioning. After a 30-min controlled baseline period, 73 7-year-olds (40 boys and 33 girls) were randomly assigned to a validity check condition or one of two experimental tasks designed to elicit fear or frustration. This was followed by a 60-min controlled regulation phase. A total of 17 saliva samples were collected, including 12 poststress samples at 5-min intervals. There was a significant stress modality effect, with children exposed to the fear condition reaching peak cortisol levels at 25 min poststress and those exposed to the frustration condition reaching peak levels at 45 min poststress. There was no difference in peak cortisol levels between the stress modalities. Individual variability across conditions was significant, with participants reaching peak levels as early as 10 min poststress and as late as 60 min poststress. Our data suggest that analysis of individual curves prior to making group-level comparisons may improve the explanatory power of HPA axis behavior models.