The Power of Prestige: Explaining China’s Nuclear Weapons Decisions

ABSTRACT

The majority of the nuclear proliferation literature is dedicated to understanding why states acquire nuclear weapons. While this question remains important, it is also advantageous to push beyond this inquiry to ask what motivates a state’s nuclear decisions after acquisition. Recent research indicates that a state’s nuclear force structure is heavily influenced by its threat environment. But what explains decisions relating to specific nuclear weapon systems? If security is a sufficient explanatory variable, then why would a state pursue nuclear weapons with high development and production costs but relatively low security gains? Using China as a case study, this article explores the power of prestige in explaining such decisions.     

Physical health and crime among low-income urban women: An application of general strain theory

Purpose

Although studies of General Strain Theory (GST) typically include measures of physical health in multi-item indices of strain, no work has investigated the independent influence of physical health on criminal offending. The current research explores the relationship between physical health and criminal offending among low-income women living in disadvantaged neighborhoods.

Methods

Using data from the Welfare, Children, and Families (WCF) project, criminal behavior is predicted over two years with measures of physical health, depression, anxiety, competing strain, and relevant background factors.

Results

Poorer physical health at baseline and declines in physical health increase the odds of offending onset among previous non-offenders and reduce the odds of decreased offending among previous offenders. In offending onset models, higher levels of anxiety and depression at baseline and increases in these symptoms partially mediate the effect of poorer baseline health and fully mediate the effect of the loss of physical health. In decreased offending models, increases in anxiety and depression fully mediate the effect of poorer baseline health and partially mediate the effect of the loss of physical health.

Conclusions

The data suggest that poor health and declines in physical health influence both offending onset and offending escalation directly and indirectly through increases in anxiety and depression.     

An assessment of the accuracy of discriminant function equations for sex determination of the femur and tibia from a South African population

The purpose of this study is to test the accuracy of seven discriminant function equations that have been derived by Steyn and Is?an for sex determination using measurements of the femur and tibia of South Africans of European descent (SAED). While the validity of some of the discriminant functions has been assessed by the authors who derived them, no previous independent study has been carried out to assess the accuracy of these equations. These equations have not been tested on skeletons located outside of the Gauteng province. A suite of measurements were taken on 272 femora and 256 tibiae obtained from four South African skeletal collections. The validity of each of the previously published equations for the femur was confirmed. However, two functions of the tibia showed low accuracy rates, most likely due to difficulties in recording the distal epiphyseal breadth measurement, and thus were found to be poor assessors of sex.     

The Effect of Post-ID Feedback on Retrospective Self-Reports in Showups

This study examined the effects of post-identification feedback on witness retrospective self-reports in showups and lineups, and importantly, focused on guilty and innocent suspect identifications. After viewing a mock crime video, participants were asked to identify the suspect from either a target-present or target-absent photo lineup or showup. Participants were randomly assigned to receive confirming feedback (“Great job, you made the correct decision”) or no feedback about their identification, before self-reporting confidence, view, attention, willingness to testify, and trust of a witness with a similar view. We replicated the typical finding that confirming feedback inflated witness self-reports and resulted in a larger proportion of witnesses meeting the credibility threshold necessary to testify. Importantly, we also found that showups had significantly higher self-reports than lineups, despite the equal discriminability achieved in this study between these two procedures. These data provide yet another reason for the police to restrict use of showups.     

Criminalization and the Collateral Consequences of Conviction

Convicted offenders face a host of so-called “collateral” consequences: formal measures such as legal restrictions on voting, employment, housing, or public assistance, as well as informal consequences such as stigma, family tensions, and financial insecurity. These consequences extend well beyond an offender’s criminal sentence itself and are frequently more burdensome than the sentence. This essay considers two respects in which collateral consequences may be relevant to the question of what the state should, or may, criminalize. First, they may be relevant according to specific accounts of criminalization, including plausible versions of the harm principle and legal moralism. Second, they may be relevant to the legitimacy of state criminalization more generally. Thus for legal theorists concerned with the issue of legitimate criminalization, normative questions raised by collateral consequences are of central importance.     

Beliefs about secondary confession evidence: a survey of laypeople and defense attorneys

We surveyed students, community members, and defense attorneys regarding beliefs about secondary confession evidence (i.e. when a third party tells authorities that a person has confessed to him or her) from jailhouse informants and other sources. Results indicated that laypeople perceive secondary confessions as less credible than other types of evidence (e.g. forensics, DNA, eyewitness testimony), and they are knowledgeable about factors that may influence the veracity of secondary confessions, such as incentives or previous testimony. However, they underestimated or were uncertain about how persuasive secondary confessions would be to themselves or other jurors. Compared to laypeople, defense attorneys were more sensitive about issues affecting the reliability of secondary confessions.     

Developmental Markers in Adolescence: Implications for Studies of Pubertal Processes

There is inconsistency in the outcome measures of biological and psychosocial studies using measures of puberty as a predictor. For example, some studies show that maturational timing may have differential influences (positive, negative, or no effect) depending on the specific disorder, dimension of measure, and gender. Other studies have suggested that some effects may be more directly linked to pubertal stage or hormone concentrations rather than timing per se. This study outlines several conceptual and methodological issues that may be relevant to addressing these inconsistencies, in the context of examining data from a study of maturational hormones obtained from a unique longitudinal cohort of 24 girls (age 10.0 ± 1.6 years) and 36 boys (age 10.4 ± 1.6 years) in the early part of puberty, where the developmental trajectory of these hormones were tracked annually in 65% of the sample. We explored the contributions of measures of pubertal growth and sociodemographic factors on hormone concentrations. In brief, it appears that no single measure best captures the maturational processes during puberty and suggests that multiple processes are occurring in parallel. Several conceptual and methodological implications are discussed that may guide investigators in interpreting existing studies of pubertal timing and behavior as well as in conducting future studies.