A Medical City

正Taizhou plans to lead the world in both new and traditional Chinese medicineIf local government leaders have their way,the name Taizhou will soon be synonymous with China's Medical City(CMC),as it aspires to become the pharmaceutical and medical technology capital of Asia.Taizhou,even with a population of 5.08million,is a third-tier city located in the country's Jiangsu Province,on the northern bank     

Do peer group norms moderate the expression of genetic risk for aggression?

Purpose

Using a genetically informed design based on 192 Monozygotic and Dizygotic twin pairs assessed in kindergarten, this study examined whether the expression of genetic risk for physical aggression or for relational aggression varies depending on the peer group’s injunctive behaviour norms.

Methods

Physical aggression and relational aggression, as well as injunctive peer group norms in regard to these behaviours, were measured via peer nominations in the twins’ kindergarten classes.

Results

Peer groups varied considerably in terms of the level of acceptability of both physical and relational aggression. Bivariate Cholesky modeling revealed a significant gene-environment interaction, indicating that a strong genetic disposition for physical aggression was much more likely to be expressed when peer group injunctive norms were favourable to such behaviour. In contrast, genetic factors essentially played no role in explaining inter-individual differences when peer group norms discouraged physical aggression. Relational aggression was generally less explained by genetic influences and more by environmental influences regardless of peer group norms, but environmental influences became even more important when peer group norms favoured such behaviour.

Conclusions

These findings speak to the importance of the peer group in shaping aggression already in young children by either condoning or penalizing such behaviour.     

Suicide by pencil

We report an unusual suicide, committed with a common pencil. A 72-year-old male inflicted himself a penetrating thoracic wound while being hospitalized for a hip prosthesis operation. Although the patient was immediately operated, the cardiac injury appeared to be fatal. Cases of suicidal penetrating wounds of the anterior chest wall are rare and they are mostly inflicted by knives, glass fragments, or other sharp instruments. The potential danger of a pencil should be taken into consideration, especially in psychiatric hospitals and imprisonment facilities. We examined the legislation in Italy and Finland concerning the regulation of privacy in special care institutions.     

Generational Substance Abuse among Male Sexual Offenders and Paraphilics

This study examines three hypotheses: (1) there is an association of parental and offspring substance abuse for sex offenders and paraphilics; (2) there is a higher occurrence of substance abuse among the parents of sex offenders and paraphilics than seen in the general population; (3) substance abuse among the parents will be associated with a higher frequency of birth and developmental abnormalities, learning disabilities (LD), mental retardation, attertion deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and school learning problems (school dropouts, grade failures, and placement in special education) common in sex offenders and paraphilics. A sample of 1,012 male sex offenders and paraphilics were asked about substance abuse among their parents and about their own birth and developmental abnormalities and school learning problems. Three in five families had a parent who was a substance abuser and there was a significant concordance of parental and offspring substance abuse. Substance abusing parents more often than nonabusing parents had sons with developmental and learning problems on every measure examined. Results suggest that parental substance abuse appears to play a role in the neurodevelopment, associated learning problems, and substance abuse reported in studies of sex offenders and paraphilics and it should be explored as a possible factor in the genesis of sexual disorders.     

With Feeling: How Emotions Shape Negotiation

Recognition of the role played by emotions in negotiation is growing. This article synthesizes current research around four broad themes: moves and exchanges, information processing, social interaction, and context. The authors' review reveals that much of the research on this topic has focused on two key emotions, anger and happiness. More recently, negotiators have turned to other emotions such as guilt and disappointment, demonstrating that not all negative emotions have the same consequences, or activate the same regions of the brain. Focusing on social interaction, the authors note that negotiators may influence each others' emotions: whether negotiators converge to anger or happiness has different consequences for agreement. Researchers have broadened their examination of emotion by considering how external factors such as power, the number of negotiators, culture, and gender influence the impact of emotional expression. The authors also consider the function and impact of expressing authentic emotions, or choosing to use emotions strategically to gain an advantage — an issue that raises important ethical questions for negotiators. The article concludes with some practical implications of the research.     

Can restorative justice disrupt the ‘school-to-prison pipeline?’

The ‘school-to-prison pipeline’ now commonly refers to the impact of zero tolerance and other harsh exclusionary discipline policies on school suspensions and expulsions, especially felt among minority students of color in the United States. Abundant evidence now concludes that such students are suspended, expelled, disciplinarily referred and arrested at rates far exceeding either their representation in the population or that of their white peers. Restorative justice practices have emerged as an increasingly popular response to racial disparity in school discipline, supported by research, state and federal governmental initiatives. However, the capacity of restorative justice to limit the school-to-prison pipeline may remain unfulfilled unless it can disrupt current social-organizational structures that maintain racial inequity in institutional structures. This paper considers the effectiveness of restorative justice in schools as an alternative to overly punitive discipline policy and as a strategy for reducing racial disciplinary disparity. It then considers organizational and cultural impediments to implementing restorative justice to overcome racial disciplinary inequity for school-based youth and asserts that restorative justice must strive for more than incremental change inside existing systems.     

Attitudes toward sentencing guidelines and simulated sentencing among Missouri circuit court judges

This study examines attitudes toward sentencing guidelines and simulated sentencing practices among Missouri circuit court judges. In addition, the study investigates the efficacy of sentencing workshops by comparing judges who attended or did not attend workshops. All Missouri circuit court judges were mailed surveys and 97 judges responded. Results indicated that judges generally felt positive toward Missouri’s voluntary sentencing guidelines, but often failed to refer to the guidelines when sentencing sample cases. Attendance at a sentencing workshop was not associated with attitudes about Missouri sentencing guidelines or sentencing in simulated cases. Sentencing in simulated cases varied by nature of the crime and circuit type. Judges from metropolitan areas tended to sentence more leniently than judges from rural areas. In their written comments, many judges expressed fear about the possibility of mandatory guidelines. Results suggest that there is ambivalence among Missouri judges over the acceptance and use of sentencing guidelines.     

Racial structural solidarity

Abstract

Effective political action against racial injustice requires a conception of solidarity based on the social and material reality of this form of injustice. I develop such a notion of solidarity by extending Iris Young’s notion of ‘gender as seriality’ to race. This notion of solidarity avoids the problems encountered by Shelby’s ‘common oppression view’ and Gooding-Williams’s non-foundational view. On Shelby’s ‘common oppression’ view, solidarity is based solely on the victims’ shared condition of oppression. According to Shelby, all victims of racial oppression can be reasonably expected to endorse a set of principles that will move them to common action. Gooding-Williams sheds doubt on the idea that such shared principles exist and defends instead a view of politics as action-in-concert, marked by reasonable disagreement, and a non-foundational view of solidarity constituted through the controversy of politics rather than given in virtue of pre-political commitments or interests. I argue that the problem with such a notion is that it is unable to link the material and social reality of the unjust structures to the forms of political action that would effectively transform social reality. My notion of ‘structural racial solidarity’ would avoid these problems.     

Reconnecting Systems Maintenance with Social Justice: A Critical Role for Conflict Resolution

With roots in both the field of labor-management negotiation and the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, practitioners and theorists of conflict resolution have been guided by two main theories concerning the objectives of alternative dispute resolution. On the one hand is the objective of systems maintenance, with an emphasis on stability and rational decision making. On the other hand is the objective of social justice, which emphasizes changing social institutions and organizations to support the protection of basic human rights and needs. This article analyzes the assumptions of both objectives and concludes with recommendations for how to make the goals of systems maintenance and social justice mutually supporting.