Redressing Colonial Genocide: The Hereros\u27 Cause of Action Against Germany

In February 2003, the Herero People\u27s Reparations Corporation filed a complaint against Germany in the District Court of the District of Columbia alleging violations of international law, crimes against humanity, genocide, slavery, and forced labor before, during, and after the German-Herero War (1904-07). The German government, modern scholars, and other commentators have long taken the position that genocides committed by colonial governments in the nineteenth century did not violate international law at that time. Arguments for this position rely, inter alia, on the belief that all forms of genocide were first criminalized and made punishable by the 1948 U.N. Convention on Genocide. However, an analysis of contemporaneous international customary and treaty law shows this position to be wrong and supports the position that colonial acts of annihilation in Africa were illegal by the end of the nineteenth century. This article further argues that this law was directly applicable to the German-Herero War. It concludes that the Hereros\u27 case for legal redress is stronger than heretofore assumed and examine the implications for the claims of other similarly situated victims of genocide

Mental time travel in dysphoria: Differences in the content and subjective experience of past and future episodes

Previous research has shown that depressed individuals demonstrate a number of biases in their ability to retrieve past events and simulate future events. The current study investigated the content and phenomenological experience of past and future events in dysphoric and non-dysphoric individuals. Results indicated that dysphoric, compared with non-dysphoric, individuals reported fewer positive events across both temporal directions. Furthermore, phenomenological characteristics ratings suggested that dysphoric individuals saw future, but not past, events as less vivid, coherent, sensorially detailed, bodily experienced, emotionally intense and important with respect to their life story and identity. These findings are discussed with reference to theories regarding the functions of ‘mental time travel’, in particular how the muted subjective experience of future episodes in depression may impair future planning, problem-solving and self regulation

Overgeneral past and future thinking in dysphoria: the role of emotional cues and cueing methodology

Overgeneral memory, where individuals exhibit difficulties in retrieving specific episodes from autobiographical memory, has been consistently linked with emotional disorders. However, the majority of this literature has relied upon a single methodology, in which participants respond to emotional cue words with explicit instructions to retrieve/simulate specific events. Through use of sentence completion tasks the current studies explored whether overgenerality represents a habitual pattern of thinking that extends to how individuals naturally consider their personal past and future life story. In both studies, when compared with controls, dysphoric individuals evidenced overgeneral thinking style with respect to their personal past. However, overgeneral future thinking was only evident when the sentence stems included emotional words. These findings highlight the importance of investigating the overgenerality phenomenon using a variety of cueing techniques and results are discussed with reference to the previous literature exploring overgenerality and cognitive models of depression

A dysphoric's TALE: The relationship between the self-reported functions of autobiographical memory and symptoms of depression

Autobiographical memory (AM) is believed to serve self, social and directive functions; however, little is known regarding how this triad of functions operates in depression. Using the Thinking About Life Experiences questionnaire [Bluck, S., & Alea, N. (2011). Crafting the TALE: Construction of a measure to assess the functions of autobiographical remembering. Memory, 19, 470–486.; Bluck, S., Alea, N., Habermas, T., & Rubin, D. C. (2005). A TALE of three functions: The self–reported uses of autobiographical memory. Social Cognition, 23, 91–117.], two studies explored the relationship between depressive symptomology and the self-reported frequency and usefulness of AMs for self, social and directive purposes. Study 1 revealed that thinking more frequently but talking less frequently about past life events was significantly associated with higher depression scores. Recalling past events more frequently to maintain self-continuity was also significantly associated with higher depressive symptomology. However, results from Study 2 indicated that higher levels of depression were also significantly associated with less-frequent useful recollections of past life events for self-continuity purposes. Taken together, the findings suggest atypical utilisations of AM to serve self-continuity functions in depression and can be interpreted within the wider context of ruminative thought processes

Book Review: Bishop & Zucker on Nevada Corporations and LLCs

In this piece written for The Writ, the official publication of the Washoe County Bar Association, Prof. Rachel Anderson reviews Bishop and Zucker on Nevada Corporations & LLCs

Inattentional Blindness: Psychological Barriers Between Legal Mandates and Progress Toward Workplace Gender Equality

This Article uses a law and psychology approach to identify ways to strengthen the administration of justice in the corporate workplace. Essentially, a better understanding of human behavior provides insights that are useful in crafting effective laws and improving the implementation of existing laws. The analysis of perception gaps due to inattentional blindness uncovers an under-theorized factor contributing to an enduring problem. Part I sets out the workforce crisis at the individual, company, national, and international levels and the role of gender inequality in this crisis and the pace of change. Part II discusses perception gaps among demographic groups as to the presence and pervasiveness of workplace gender inequalities. Part III describes and uses inattentional blindness theory to explain these gaps. Part IV proposes some measures to infuse new energy into the pace of progress toward workplace gender equality and reduce the workplace crisis. The Article concludes with a call to action

Nevada Youth Learn About Voting Rights

Prof. Rachel Anderson describes the second Youth Voting Rights Project, an event created by Prof. Anderson in collaboration with Dr. Zachary Robbins, Clark County School District principal, to help educate Nevadan high school and middle school students on the topic of election law. Prof. Anderson also comments on the controversy surrounding Voter ID laws and the question of whether and to what degree the United States has made progress in fulfilling the promise of the Voting Rights Act

Youth Voting Rights Project 2015

The Youth Voting Rights Project educates students about voting rights and Nevada law and brings them onto the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, campus

Survival processing versus self-reference : a memory advantage following descriptive self-referential encoding

Previous research has shown that rating words for their relevance to a survival scenario leads to better retention of the words than rating them for self-reference. Past studies have, however, relied exclusively on an autobiographical self-reference task in which participants rate how easily a common noun brings to mind a personal experience. We report five experiments comparing survival processing to a descriptive self-reference task in which participants rated how well trait words described them. Rating trait adjectives for survival value led to higher levels of recall and recognition than rating them for their relevance to a moving home scenario. Rating the adjectives for self-reference, however, led to higher levels of recall (Experiments 1 and 3) and recollection (Experiment 2) than survival rating. Experiment 4 replaced trait adjectives with trait nouns and found that self-reference led to greater recognition accuracy than survival processing. Experiment 5 used trait nouns followed by tests of free recall and found a memory advantage following self-reference that was not influenced by the imageability of the stimuli. The findings are discussed in terms of theories of the survival processing and self-reference effects and the relationship between them