Fear as a Disposition and an Emotional State: A Genetic and Environmental Approach to Out‐Group Political Preferences

Fear is a pervasive aspect of political life and is often explored as a transient emotional state manipulated by events or exploited by elites for political purposes. The psychological and psychiatric literatures, however, have also established fear as a genetically informed trait, and people differ in their underlying fear dispositions. Here we propose these differences hold important implications for political preferences, particularly toward out‐groups. Using a large sample of related individuals, we find that individuals with a higher degree of social fear have more negative out‐group opinions, which, in this study, manifest as anti‐immigration and prosegregation attitudes. We decompose the covariation between social fear and attitudes and find the principal pathway by which the two are related is through a shared genetic foundation. Our findings present a novel mechanism explicating how fear manifests as out‐group attitudes and accounts for some portion of the genetic influences on political attitudes.     

Enforcing the ‘Community Interest’ in Combating Transnational Crimes: The Potential for Public Interest Litigation

Netherlands International Law Review - Transnational criminal law treaties could give rise to public interest litigation concerning the breach of an obligation erga omnes partes, meaning an...     

Goffman on the Jury: Real Jurors’ Attention to the “Offstage” of Trials

Social psychologist Erving Goffman, in his classic work The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, provides a framework that explains why jurors may turn their attention at the courthouse to information not formally presented from the witness stand. We dub this “offstage observation,” a type of juror behavior that has not been systematically examined empirically. Analyzing a unique data source of 50 actual jury deliberations in civil trials, we find that jurors do look to the offstage in evaluating the claims of the parties. However, in contrast to predictions, these observations played a surprisingly minor role in the jury deliberation process.     

基于似然率方法的语音证据评价

法庭话者识别技术引入我国已有二十多年，目前该技术已经广泛应用于各类刑事和民事案件中，纵观世界各国的法庭证据评价体系，除了DNA证据以外，其他证据检验鉴定结论的表述通常有三种：同一认定、否定排除和倾向性意见。简单肯定和否定的结论存在很大的弊端．即过高估计了证据的力度，因而有时可能会造成错案。鉴于此,国外一些学者提出在鉴定结论的表述和价值评判上引入基于贝叶斯理论的“似然率”方法。本文结合目前的法庭话者鉴别方法。重点介绍基于贝叶斯理论下的“似然率”理论体系．并阐明该方法的优越性、局限性以及一些亟待解决的问题。     

Love,labour, loss: women,refugees and the servant crisis in Britain, 1933–1939

Between 1933 and 1939, around 20,000 Jewish, ‘non-Aryan’ or politically active refugee women from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia entered Britain on domestic service permits. Their immigration, mostly organised by women in the British voluntary sector, served as a moral response to the humanitarian crisis caused by Fascism in Europe, and a practical response to the ‘servant crisis’ in Britain as working-class women increasingly rejected domestic labour. This paper considers the practical and emotional relationships around domestic service and argues that the acceptance of refugee women into the metropolitan British home was conditional on the tacit expectation they could fill the vacancy left by the working classes, becoming British through their labour.     

What Does Feminism Want?

This conference confirms the loss of a singular, unified women's movement under the pressures of race, sexuality and class and asks for new directions. The need to rethink collectivity suggests that identification is a priority for feminism rather than desire , which has been the dominant discourse of the psychoanalytical wing of the movement. There are psychoanalytical accounts of the group, but they will have to withstand New Labour's punitive address to the superego by its conservative personalizing of social issues. Thus the relation between psychoanalysis and politics is now a major issue, revealing as it does the problems of coercion in an environment where collective accountability has ceased to exist. Our models of the feminine can be neither Thatcher nor Diana both of whom occlude social accountability. Though the question of sexual difference has not gone away, we need to reformulate the problems, finding new forms of language and of public speech to address a wider constituency, and a radical politics that will reach beyond the academic world. Finally, arising from this, two questions need to be asked. What does feminism want a subject to be? Does feminism want something to serve in the place of some kind of truth?     

Do Russians see their future in Europe or the CIS?

Historic differences between Russian elites about where the country's future lies are here addressed by examining what the Russian public thinks, using data from the New Russia Barometer survey. More than two thirds see the country's future with the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and less than one third see it with Europe. Alternative explanations for these differences are tested statistically. The most important influences making Russians look to the near abroad are traditional identities, national pride and age. Although cosmopolitan contacts of individuals with the West encourage people to be pro-European, Russians are likely to continue to view their world as a CIS space. However, this does not indicate a popular demand to re-establish Imperial dominance but rather a durable commitment among most Russians to a Eurasian rather than European view of the world.