As the issue of food safety became one of the important public agenda, consumer concern for food safety became the general public concern. The Korea U.S. Free Trade Agreement (KORUS FTA) completion allowing import of U.S. beef to Korea has turned into a massive public uproar and a series of demonstrations, revealing widespread concerns on the part of Korean producers and consumers about government food safety regulations and mishandling of the beef trade requirement. The mishandling of public concerns for BSE (...) on U.S. beef import by the administrators led to a breakdown of the relationship between the public and the government and a loss of consumer confidence in Korea’s food safety system. The KORUS FTA beef crisis raised the issues of government accountability and the importance of understanding moral and ethical aspects of food safety management that pose perceived risk for BSE by the Korean citizen. The aim of this paper is to address the importance of understanding consumer concerns, food ethics and of appropriate risk communication in dealing with politically and publically sensitive food safety issues. This is achieved by assessing the factors that contributed to the conflict between the Korean government and the Korean public over the KORUS FTA beef agreement. (shrink)

The present study examined the attitudes of Filipino middle school students toward physical education and the associations between PE attitude and various personal and external correlates of PE. In total, 659 middle school students, aged between 12 and 19 years, participated in the study. The Physical Education Attitude Scale was used to measure affective, cognitive, and motivational/behavioral attitudes of adolescent students toward PE. Results showed that middle school students had moderate general attitudes toward PE. Female students had more favorable attitudes (...) toward PE when their teacher was male than female. When the teacher was female, male students were more satisfied with the PE curriculum than female students. When the teacher was male, female students were more comfortable with the PE curriculum than male students. Finally, students' PE attitude did not decrease as they got older, regardless of student sex. The findings provide a different perspective for the field and underscore the importance of not only the PE curriculum but also the student–teacher relationship. To prevent the decline in students' positive attitude and encourage positive behaviors toward PE and activities, teachers should be very considerate about their interactions with students of the same sex; school administrators, meanwhile, should focus at providing PE teachers with special training courses to enhance both their teaching and communication capabilities. (shrink)

Pickering & Garrod (P&G) suggest that communicators synchronize their processing at a number of linguistic levels. Whereas their explanation suggests that representations are being compared across individuals, there must be some representation of all conversation participants in each participant's head. At the level of the situation model, it is important to maintain separate representations for each participant. At other levels, it seems less crucial to have a separate representation for each participant. This analysis suggests that different mechanisms may synchronize representations (...) at different linguistic levels. (shrink)

This article analyzes U.S. court cases involving reproductive technologies in terms of their implications for reproductive choice, mothers' versus fathers' rights, definitions and evaluations of parenting, and the nuclear family structure. The analysis reveals that the courts have tended not to recognize how social conditions shape women's reproductive choices, to promote fathers' rights more than mothers' rights, to ignore the social relationships that constitute childbearing and child rearing and value men's over women's biological contribution to these processes, to reflect certain (...) assumptions about the proper roles of mothers and fathers, and to privilege the nuclear family. The implications of developing reproductive technology policy for an understanding of the relationships among gender, reproductive technologies, and the state are considered, and recommendations for the equitable regulation of these technologies are offered. (shrink)

Approximately one in 10 children in foster care are medically complex and require intensive medical supervision, frequent hospitalization, and difficult medical decision making. Some of these children are in foster care because their parents cannot care for their medical needs; other parents are responsible for their child’s medical needs due to abuse or neglect. In either case, there can be uncertainty about the role that a child’s biological parents should play in making serious medical decisions. Here we highlight some of (...) the ethical challenges inherent in making these decisions for children in foster care, as seen through the lenses of a child welfare provider, an inpatient care physician, and a primary care pediatrician. (shrink)

Subjects enrolled in studies testing high risk interventions for incurable or progressive brain diseases may be vulnerable to deficiencies in informed consent, such as the therapeutic misconception. However, the definition and measurement of the therapeutic misconception is a subject of continuing debate. Our qualitative pilot study of persons enrolled in a phase I trial of gene transfer for Parkinson disease suggests potential avenues for both measuring and preventing the therapeutic misconception. Building on earlier literature on the topic, we developed and (...) tested an interview guide that focuses on how the subjects decided to participate, emphasizing the integration of subjects’ various statements that are relevant to assessing the therapeutic misconception, rather than evaluating them as isolated statements. The results indicate that a subject’s understanding of the purpose of research is best explored in juxtaposition to the subject’s motivation for participating. (shrink)

Bioethicists have long been concerned that seriously ill patients entering early phase (‘phase I’) treatment trials are motivated by therapeutic benefit even though the likelihood of benefit is low. In spite of these concerns, consent forms for phase I studies involving seriously ill patients generally employ indeterminate benefit statements rather than unambiguous statements of unlikely benefit. This seeming mismatch between attitudes and actions suggests a need to better understand research ethics committee members’ attitudes toward communication of potential benefits and risks (...) of early phase studies to potential subjects. We surveyed the members of two U.S. research ethics committees using a phase I gene transfer study scenario, and compared the results to a previous survey of potential subjects’ perceptions and attitudes toward benefit and risk for the same protocol. The results show that there is indeed a gap between the subjects’ perceptions and the committee members’ views on what is appropriate to be communicated to research subjects. This discrepancy is the product of both the commonly assumed optimism of the subjects and to a “protective pessimism” of the research ethics committee members. We discuss this discrepancy using “frameworks of trust” and demonstrate the need to incorporate these frameworks into the existing model of informed consent. (shrink)

This research presents a computer model called EUREKA that begins with novice‐like strategies and knowledge organizations for solving physics word problems and acquires features of knowledge organizations and basic approaches that characterize experts in this domain. EUREKA learns a highly interrelated network of problem‐type schemas with associated solution methodologies. Initially, superficial features of the problem statement form the basis for both the problem‐type schemas and the discriminating features that organize them in the P‐MOP (Problem Memory Organization Packet) network. As EUREKA (...) solves more problems, the content of the schemas and the discriminating features change to reflect more fundamental physics principles. This changing network allows EUREKA to shift from a novicelike means‐ends strategy to a more expertlike “knowledge development” strategy in which the presence of abstract concepts are triggered by problem features. In this model, the strategy shift emerges as a natural consequence of the evolving expertlike organization of problem‐type schemos. EUREKA captures many of the descriptive models of novice expert differences, and also suggests a number of empirically testable assumptions regarding problem‐solving strategies and the representation of problem‐solving knowledge. (shrink)

This article investigates the moderating effects of organizational social consciousness on the natural environmental competency and innovativeness relationship. Organizational social consciousness reflects the organization’s awareness of its place and contribution to the larger system in which it exists and is developed through an organization’s social responsibility, ethics, culture, corporate values, and the view of its stakeholders. Through our study of key strategic decision makers from organizations located in the USA, we operationalize organizational social consciousness and demonstrate the efficacy of this (...) construct in relation to the organizational-level constructs of environmental management competency and innovativeness. Our results reveal that organizational social consciousness positively strengthens the natural environmental competency to organizational innovativeness relationship. (shrink)

In response to nutrient limitation, many animals, including Caenorhabditis elegans, slow or arrest their development. This process requires mechanisms that sense essential nutrients and induce appropriate responses. When faced with nutrient limitation, C. elegans can induce both short and long‐term survival strategies, including larval arrest, decreased developmental rate, and dauer formation. To select the most advantageous strategy, information from many different sensors must be integrated into signaling pathways, including target of rapamycin (TOR) and insulin, that regulate developmental progression. Here, how (...) nutrient information is sensed and integrated into developmental decisions that determine developmental rate and progression in C. elegans is reviewed. (shrink)

Most jurisdictions require that a mental capacity assessment be conducted using a functional model whose definition includes several abilities. In England and Wales and in increasing number of countries, the law requires a person be able to understand, to retain, to use or weigh relevant information and to communicate one’s decision. But interpreting and applying broad and vague criteria, such as the ability ‘to use or weigh’ to a diverse range of presentations is challenging. By examining actual court judgements of (...) capacity, we previously developed a descriptive typology of justifications used in the application of the Mental Capacity Act criteria. We here critically optimise this typology by showing how clear definitions—and thus boundaries—between the criteria can be achieved if the ‘understanding’ criterion is used narrowly and the multiple rationales that fall under the ability to ‘use or weigh’ are specifically enumerated in practice. Such a typology-aided practice, in theory, could make functional capacity assessments more transparent, accountable, reliable and valid. It may also help to create targeted supports for decision making by the vulnerable. We also discuss how the typology could evolve legally and scientifically, and how it lays the groundwork for clinical research on the abilities enumerated by the MCA. No data are available. This paper does not report any original data. (shrink)

Disturbed identity is one of the defining characteristics of Borderline Personality Disorder manifested in a broad spectrum of dysfunctions related to the self, including disturbances in meaning-generating self-narratives. Autobiographical memories are memories of personal events that provide crucial building-blocks in our construction of a life-story, self-concept, and a meaning-generating narrative identity. The cultural life script represents culturally shared expectations as to the order and timing of life events in a prototypical life course within a given culture. It is used to (...) organize one’s autobiographical memories. Here, 17 BPD-patients, 14 OCD-patients, and 23 non-clinical controls generated three important autobiographical memories and their conceptions of the cultural life script. BPD-patients reported substantially more negative memories, fewer of their memories were of prototypical life script events, their memory narratives were less coherent and more disoriented, and the overall typicality of their life scripts was lower as compared with the other two groups. (shrink)

The spatial organization of the genome is intimately linked to its biological function, yet our understanding of higher order genomic structure is coarse, fragmented and incomplete. In the nucleus of eukaryotic cells, interphase chromosomes occupy distinct.

Tests of economic theory often focus on choice outcomes and find significant individual differences in these outcomes. This variability may mask universal psychological processes that lead to different choices because of differences across cultures in the information people have available when making decisions. On this view, decision making research within and across cultures must focus on the processes underlying choice.

Pothos suggests dispensing with the distinction between rules and similarity, without defining what is meant by either term. We agree that there are problems with the distinction between rules and similarity, but believe these will be solved only by exploring the representations and processes underlying cases purported to involve rules and similarity.

Different aspects of people's interactions with money are best conceptualized using the drug and tool theories. The key question is when these models of money are most likely to guide behavior. We suggest that the Drug Theory characterizes motivationally active uses of money and that the Tool Theory characterizes behavior in motivationally cool situations. (Published Online April 5 2006).

ABSTRACTThe visual system has been found to prioritise emotional stimuli so robustly that their presence can temporarily “blind” people to non-emotional targets in their direct line of vision. This...

Food-specific inhibition training (FSIT) is a computerised task requiring response inhibition to energy-dense foods within a reaction-time game. Previous work indicates that FSIT can increase the number of healthy foods (relative to energy-dense foods) children choose, and decrease calories consumed from sweets and chocolate. Across two studies, we explored the impact of FSIT variations (e.g., different response signals, different delivery modes) on children’s food choices within a time-limited hypothetical food-choice task. In Study 1, we varied the FSIT Go/No-Go signals to (...) be emotive (happy vs. sad faces) or neutral (green vs. red signs). One-hundred-and-fifty-seven children were randomly allocated to emotive-FSIT, neutral-FSIT, or a non-food control task. Children participated in groups of 4–15. No significant FSIT effects were observed on food choices (all values ofp> 0.160). Healthy-food choices decreased over time regardless of condition (p 0.050). Healthy choices decreased over time in the control group (p= 0.001) but did not change in the two FSIT groups (bothp> 0.300) supporting previous evidence that FSIT may have a beneficial effect on children’s food choices. Ensuring that children perform FSIT with high accuracy (e.g., by using FSIT in quiet environments and avoiding group-testing) may be important for impacts on food choices though. Future research should continue to explore methods of optimising FSIT as a healthy-eating intervention for children. (shrink)

Can you think of a meme that made you laugh or a political post that made you angry? These examples illustrate how social media use (SMU) impacts how people feel. Similarly, how people feel when they initiate SMU may impact the emotional effects of SMU. Someone feeling happy may feel more positively during SMU, whereas someone feeling sad may feel more negatively. Using an experimental design, we examined whether following SMU, those in a happy mood would experience increases in positive (...) affect (PA) and those in a sad mood would experience increases in negative affect (NA). A large sample of college students (N = 703) were randomly assigned to a happy, sad, or neutral mood induction before SMU. PA and NA were assessed at baseline, post-mood induction, and after SMU. Contrary to hypotheses, after SMU, people in happy moods experienced decreases in PA, and those in sad moods experienced decreases in NA, reflecting SMU having a dampening effect on emotions. PA and NA were significantly lower after SMU compared to baseline and did not vary by condition. How young adults feel when they log onto SMU matters in understanding how SMU impacts PA and NA, but on average, emotional experiences are dampened. (shrink)

Inclusive single jet production in hadron collisions is considered. It is shown that the QCD parton model predicts a nonmonotonic dependence of the inclusive cross section on the fraction of the energy deposited in the jet registered, if it is normalized on the same cross section measured at another collision energy. Specifically, if the cross section is normalized by the one measured at a higher collision energy, it possesses a minimum which depends on jet rapidity. This prediction can be tested (...) at the Fermilab Tevatron, at the CERN LHC, and at the Very Large Hadron Collider under discussion. (shrink)

In diffusion creep, the contribution of grain-boundary sliding to the overall strain o s can be evaluated in arbitrary polycrystals, if the angular distribution of grain boundaries is known. A o s value of 0.5 is obtained for two-dimensional equiaxed microstructures consisting of regular hexagonal grains, equiaxed grains grown from a Voronoi structure or grains having a circular distribution of grain-boundary angles. The o s value is also evaluated for uniaxially deformed 2D microstructures, both diffusionally and uniformly deformed. For the (...) former, the deformed microstructure is obtained by the simulation of microstructural evolution in polycrystals with straight grain boundaries. The o s value increases gradually with increasing or decreasing strain and is larger in the diffusionally deformed microstructures than in the uniformly deformed microstructures for a given grain aspect ratio. The o s value for three-dimensional polycrystalline microstructures is also obtained from an ellipsoidal distribution of grain-boundary angles. The resultant o s value is 0.60 for 3D equiaxed polycrystals and increases gradually with increasing strain. (shrink)