Compensatory Control Theory and Public Opinion on Nuclear Policy: Developing an Experimental Measure in an Applied Environmental Context

This chapter covers French nuclear policy since 1945. It emphasizes that, although public opinion had been consistently more anti-nuclear than pro-nuclear, there has been a pro-nuclear consensus among the French governing parties and therefore a low salience of the nuclear energy issue in political competition. The chapter shows that the Greens, founded in 1984, became the first relevant party opposing nuclear energy and paying more attention to nuclear energy in their manifestos than any other party. The chapter argues that, since they became a relevant player, the issue has become important in defining the difference between the parties of the left and right. New policy proposals and eventually also real policy changes were introduced. France still is the country relying most on nuclear energy, but the growth of the French nuclear programme has been stopped. The chapter concludes that the future development of nuclear energy in France is uncertain.

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Memorial Consequences of Environmental Context Change in Children and Adults

Experimental Psychology (formerly Zeitschrift für Experimentelle Psychologie) ◽

10.1027/1618-3169/a000056 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 57 (6) ◽

pp. 455-461 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Alp Aslan ◽

Anuscheh Samenieh ◽

Tobias Staudigl ◽

Karl-Heinz T. Bäuml

Keyword(s):

Elementary School ◽

Young Adults ◽

Episodic Memory ◽

Middle Childhood ◽

First Graders ◽

Fourth Graders ◽

Environmental Context ◽

Context Change ◽

Context Dependent

Changing environmental context during encoding can influence episodic memory. This study examined the memorial consequences of environmental context change in children. Kindergartners, first and fourth graders, and young adults studied two lists of items, either in the same room (no context change) or in two different rooms (context change), and subsequently were tested on the two lists in the room in which the second list was encoded. As expected, in adults, the context change impaired recall of the first list and improved recall of the second. Whereas fourth graders showed the same pattern of results as adults, in both kindergartners and first graders no memorial effects of the context change arose. The results indicate that the two effects of environmental context change develop contemporaneously over middle childhood and reach maturity at the end of the elementary school days. The findings are discussed in light of both retrieval-based and encoding-based accounts of context-dependent memory.

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