People with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) often report difficulties with attention and memory on tasks that are unrelated to their trauma. One important component of everyday event comprehension is the segmentation of ongoing activity into meaningful events. The present study asked whether PTSD symptom severity was associated with impaired segmentation and memory for neutral, ongoing activity. A sample of 137 participants, ages 21-79, completed event segmentation and memory tasks, general cognitive functioning tasks, and questionnaires assessing PTSD symptom severity. People with higher levels of PTSD symptoms had poorer event segmentation and event memory performance. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses demonstrated that PTSD symptom severity explained unique variance in event segmentation performance, even after controlling for general cognitive function. These results suggest that interventions aimed at improving event comprehension may help compensate for memory disruptions in PTSD.

Technology is a centrally important component of all strategies to mitigate climate change. As such, it encompasses a multi-dimensional space that is far too large to be fully addressed in this brief chapter. Consequently, we have elected to focus on a subset of topics that we believe have the potential for substantial impact. As researchers, we have also narrowed our focus to address applied research, development and deployment issues and omit basic research topics that have a longer-term impact. This handful of topics also omits technologies that we deem to be relatively mature, such as solar photovoltaics and wind turbines, even though we acknowledge that additional research could further reduce costs and enhance performance. These and other mature technologies such as transportation are discussed in Chapter 6. This report and the related Summit Conference are an outgrowth of the University of California President’s Carbon Neutrality Initiative, and consequently we are strongly motivated by the special demands of this ambitious goal, as we are also motivated by the corresponding goals for the State of California, the nation and the world. The unique feature of the UC Carbon Neutrality Initiative is the quest to achieve zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2025 at all ten 10 campuses. It should be emphasized that a zero emission target is enormously demanding and requires careful strategic planning to arrive at a mix of technologies, policies, and behavioral measures, as well as highly effective communication – all of which are far more challenging than reducing emissions by some 40% or even 80%. Each campus has a unique set of requirements based on its current energy and emissions. Factors such as a local climate, dependence on cogeneration, access to wholesale electricity markets, and whether a medical school is included shape the specific challenges of the campuses, each of which is a “living laboratory” setting a model for others to learn and adopt. An additional aspect of a zero GHG emission target is the need to pay close attention to system integration – i.e., how the various elements of a plan to achieve carbon neutrality fit together in the most cost effective and efficient way. This optimization imposes an additional constraint, but also provides an important opportunity to capture the synergies that can arise from those choices. For example, one of the themes that has been proposed is the complete electrification of energy supplies, residential & commercial building operation, and transportation. The deployment of storage technologies such as batteries and/or hydrogen for both transportation and for load balancing of grid and distributed generation may provide some synergistic opportunities for integrating these systems that will accelerate the deployment of each. A specific example is the use of on-board batteries in electric vehicles for load balancing the electric grid. On-site residential storage as is now being developed by Tesla Motors, has the potential to accelerate the deployment of residential solar installations. In the case of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, the necessary infrastructure to provide a network of hydrogen filling stations might also accelerate the use of hydrogen for storage on the electric grid by using excess solar capacity to produce hydrogen by electrolysis.

California is one of the least greenhouse-gas intensive states in the United States, and one of the most energy efficient economies in the world. Its success is partly an accident of geography, due to a temperate climate, and its service-based economy with little emissions-intensive industry. But California’s governors, state legislators, and local agencies have also shown a willingness to enact climate legislation and implement mitigation policies, far ahead of the federal government and most other states. In part, climate action in California is rooted in the legacy of the air quality and energy efficiency programs from the 1970s and 1980s, which bequeathed state agencies with a depth of technical, regulatory and legal expertise. However, California has also legitimized climate mitigation as a matter of state action, and demonstrates high public accountability and enlists powerful coalitions by providing substantial and enduring incentives. This article discusses the range of mitigation policies, from cap-and-trade to vehicle efficiency and green building standards, that California has implemented, and the political coalition that has enabled their introduction. It also highlights challenges, particularly the difficulty in passing down mandates and incentives for emissions reduction to local government agencies, which retain a monopoly in land-use planning.

Bayesian inference has been advocated as an alternative to conventional analysis in psychological science. Bayesians stress that subjectivity is needed for principled inference, and subjectivity by-and-large has not been seen as desirable. This paper provides the broader rationale and context for subjectivity, and in it we show that subjectivity is the key to principled measures of evidence for theory from data. By making our subjective elements focal, we provide an avenue for common sense and expertise to enter the analysis. We cover the role of models in linking theory to data, the notion that models are abstractions which are neither true nor false, the need for relative model comparison, the role of predictions in stating relative evidence for models, and the role of subjectivity in specifying models that yield predictions. In the end, we conclude that transparent subjectivity leads to a more honest and fruitful analyses in psychological science.

Climate change is projected to cause widespread and serious harm to public health and the environment upon which life depends, unraveling many of the health and social gains of the last century. The burden of harm will fall disproportionately on the poorest communities, both in the U.S. and globally, raising urgent issues of “climate justice”. In contrast, strategies for climate action, including those of an institutional, and cultural nature, have the potential to improve quality of life for everyone. This chapter examines the social dimensions of building carbon neutral societies, with an emphasis on producing behavioral shifts, among both the most and the least advantaged populations. In support of Bending the Curve solutions 2 and 3, the case studies offered in this chapter rely not only on innovations in technology and policy, but innovations in attitudinal and behavioral change as well, focused on coordinated public communication and education (Solution 2), as well as new platforms for collaborating, where leaders across sectors can convene to tackle concrete problems (Solution 3).

Sound symbolism is increasingly understood as involving iconicity, or perceptual analogies and cross-modal correspondences between form and meaning, but the search for its functional and neural correlates is ongoing. Here we study how people learn sound-symbolic words, using behavioural, electrophysiological and individual difference measures. Dutch participants learned Japanese ideophones —lexical sound-symbolic words— with a translation of either the real meaning (in which form and meaning show cross-modal correspondences) or the opposite meaning (in which form and meaning show cross-modal clashes). Participants were significantly better at identifying the words they learned in the real condition, correctly remembering the real word pairing 86.7% of the time, but the opposite word pairing only 71.3% of the time. Analysing event-related potentials (ERPs) during the test round showed that ideophones in the real condition elicited a greater P3 component and late positive complex than ideophones in the opposite condition. In a subsequent forced choice task, participants were asked to guess the real translation from two alternatives. They did this with 73.0% accuracy, well above chance level even for words they had encountered in the opposite condition, showing that people are generally sensitive to the sound-symbolic cues in ideophones. Individual difference measures showed that the ERP effect in the test round of the learning task was greater for participants who were more sensitive to sound symbolism in the forced choice task. The main driver of the difference was a lower amplitude of the P3 component in response to ideophones in the opposite condition, suggesting that people who are more sensitive to sound symbolism may have more difficulty to suppress conflicting cross-modal information. The findings provide new evidence that cross-modal correspondences between sound and meaning facilitate word learning, while cross-modal clashes make word learning harder, especially for people who are more sensitive to sound symbolism.

In the developed world, discussions of climate change mitigation and adaptation tend to focus on technological solutions such as decarbonizing electric grids and regulating emissions of methane, black carbon, and so on. However, an often overlooked strategy for reaching greenhouse gas reduction targets in much of the developing world is rooted, not in new technologies, but in vegetation management. Trees and other vegetation absorb carbon as they grow and release carbon when they are burnt, so landscapes function as carbon sinks and carbon storage sites when forests are growing, on one hand, and as carbon sources when forests are cleared, on the other. Since greenhouse gas emissions from such land use changes rival emissions from the entire transport sector, trees and vegetation are essential to efforts to slow and adapt to climate change. Under the right circumstances, vegetation recovery and its carbon uptake occur quickly. Moreover, carbon uptake can be strongly affected by human management of forests; the right kinds of management can improve rates of recovery and carbon sequestration substantially. This chapter reviews carbon dynamics in mature forests, secondary forests, agroforests and tree landscapes in urban areas to point out the variability of these systems and the potential for enhancing carbon uptake and storage. Furthermore, vegetation systems have many additional benefits in the form of other environmental services, such as improving livelihoods, subsistence insurance habitat, microclimates, and water systems. Finally, by managing forests better, we can also make significant contributions to climate justice because most global forests and forested landscapes are under the stewardship of small holders.

Learned visual categorical perception (CP) effects were assessed using three different measures (similarity rating, same-different judgment, and an XAB task) and two sets of stimuli differing in discriminability and varying on one category-relevant and one category-irrelevant dimension. Participant scores were converted to a common scale to allow assessment method to serve as an independent variable. Two different analyses using the Bayes Factor approach produced patterns of results consistent with learned CP effects: compared to a control group, participants trained on the category distinction could better discriminate between-category pairs of stimuli and were more sensitive to the category-relevant dimension. In addition, performance was better in general for the more highly discriminable stimuli, but stimulus discriminability did not influence the pattern of observed CP effects. Furthermore, these results were consistent regardless of how performance was assessed. This suggests that, for these methods at least, learned CP effects are robust across substantially different performance measures. Four different kinds of learned CP effects are reported in the literature singly or in combination: greater sensitivity between categories, reduced sensitivity within categories, increased sensitivity to category-relevant dimensions, and decreased sensitivity to category-irrelevant dimensions. The results of the current study suggest that the cause of these different patterns of CP effects is not due to either stimulus discriminability or assessment task. Other possible causes of the differences in reported CP findings are discussed.

Style is an important aspect of literature, and stylistic deviations are sometimes labeled foregrounded, since their manner of expression deviates from the stylistic default. Russian Formalists have claimed that foregrounding increases processing demands and therefore causes slower reading – an effect called retardation. We tested this claim experimentally by having participants read short literary stories while measuring their eye movements. Our results confirm that readers indeed read slower and make more regressions towards foregrounded passages as compared to passages that are not foregrounded. A closer look, however, reveals significant individual differences in sensitivity to foregrounding. Some readers in fact do not slow down at all when reading foregrounded passages. The slowing down effect for literariness was related to a slowing down effect for high perplexity (unexpected) words: those readers who slowed down more during literary passages also slowed down more during high perplexity words, even though no correlation between literariness and perplexity existed in the stories. We conclude that individual differences play a major role in processing of literary texts and argue for accounts of literary reading that focus on the interplay between reader and text.

We are living in a world of over seven billion people, with annual greenhouse gas emissions of approximately 50 billion tons a year and rising steadily. If continued unabated, the world is on target to warm by about 2 °C in less than 40 years, pushing the climate to a regime unlike any that has been witnessed in the last million years. Nonetheless, we still have time to avert such a catastrophic scenario, or delay its occurrence by several decades to provide human societies and the ecosystem with the time to adjust. In order to mitigate the possibility of climate disruption, we need to recognize that fossil fuel based technologies have become outdated and transform the energy system to that of low-carbon, sustainable and secure energy systems. In addition, we have to mitigate emissions of the four short-lived climate pollutants to bring immediate relief from climate change and protect vulnerable societies. Stability of the climate system involves not only the centrality of scientific and technological advancements and investments, but also necessary shifts in social structure and behavior by individuals, communities and societies worldwide as well as market based instruments, sub-national collaborations and governance structure. Fortunately, living laboratories—such as the State of California and the University of California system, which has pledged to become carbon neutral by 2025—provide demonstrable solutions which hold promise in alleviating the climate warming in the next generation. These jurisdictions are tiny emitters in the global picture, but they offer the potential for leverage through demonstrating (Figure 1) new technologies as well as workable institutions that cut emissions. We outline 10 pragmatic solutions—a “kit of parts” rooted in California but scalable to the world—that taken together, can “bend the curve” of the upward trajectory of human-caused warming trends. Wholesale transformation of our current fossil fuel based energy systems towards sustainable energy is among the greatest of societal challenges—and opportunities—faced in the 21st century.