The European Power Hierarchy, Member State Trust, and Public Support for the Common Security and Defense Policy. Jean Monnet/Robert Schuman Paper Series Vol. 15 No. 2, August 2015

Existing studies focus on overall support for European integration while less work has been done on explaining public opinion on specific policy areas, such as the development of the Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP). We hypothesize that the probability of supporting a CSDP increases with greater levels of trust in the European Union member states, most notably the more powerful members. This variable is critical since integration’s development is influenced strongly by, and dependent on, the resources of the relatively more powerful European member states. Binary logistic regression analyses using pooled repeated cross-sectional data from the Eurobarometer surveys conducted from 1992 to 1997 among individuals of 11 member states largely support these claims.

Snakes and cats in the flower bed: Fast detection is not specific to pictures of fear-relevant animals

The observation that snakes and spiders are found faster among flowers and mushrooms than vice versa and that this search advantage is independent of set size supports the notion that fear-relevant stimuli are processed preferentially in a dedicated fear module. Experiment I replicated the faster identification of snakes and spiders but also found a set size effect in a blocked, but not in a mixed-trial, sequence. Experiment 2 failed to find faster identification of snake and spider deviants relative to other animals among flowers and mushrooms and provided evidence for a search advantage for pictures of animals, irrespective of their fear relevance. These findings suggest that results from the present visual search task cannot support the notion of preferential processing of fear relevance.