Fifteen years after “Animal Liberation”: Has the animal rights movement achieved philosophical legitimacy?

Fifteen years ago, Peter Singer published Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals. In it, he proposed to end "the tyranny of humans over nonhuman animals" by "thinking through, carefully, and consistently, the question of how we ought to treat animals" (p. ix). On this anniversary of the book's publication, a critical analysis shows that the logic he presents, though popularly appealing, is philosophically flawed. Though influential in slowing and in some cases stopping biomedical research involving animals, the animal rights movement in the United States has yet to offer a clear and compelling argument for the equality of species.     

Stability and change in interests: A longitudinal examination of grades 7 through college

The joint issue of stability and change of interests in adolescence and early adulthood was investigated longitudinally over three years in three different grade cohorts. The patterns of structural stability, mean stability, rank order stability, and profile stability as well as how these patterns were moderated by gender were examined based on three cohorts of grades 7 and 8 (n = 3191), grades 9 and 10 (n = 6818), and grades 11 and 12 (n = 1078) using the Personal Globe Inventory-Short (Tracey, 2010). Results indicated that adherence to the RIASEC circular model was high and stable; there was a lack of appreciable change in interest means; interests were stable; interest crystallization, profile, and pattern were stable. While the results supported late adolescence and early adulthood being a stable period for interests in general, more changes were found among male and younger students. The implication of the current study was discussed along with its limitations and suggestions for future research.     

The interpersonal circumplex as a model of interpersonal capabilities

In this study, we sought to challenge the existing conceptualization of interpersonal capabilities as a distinct construct from interpersonal traits by explicitly taking into account the general factor inherent within most models of circumplexes. A sample of 206 college students completed a battery of measures including the Battery of Interpersonal Capabilities (BIC; Paulhus & Martin, 1987). Principal components analysis and the randomization test of hypothesized order relations demonstrated that contrary to previous findings, the BIC adhered to a circular ordering. Joint analysis of the BIC with the Interpersonal Adjective Scale (Wiggins, 1995) using principal components analysis and structural equation modeling demonstrated that the 2 measures represented similar constructs. Furthermore, the general factor in the BIC was not correlated with measures of general self-competence, satisfaction with life, or general pathology.     

Generalizability of interest structure to China: Application of the Personal Globe Inventory

Two Chinese samples of the high school students (N=721) and the college students (N=943) were administered a translated version of the Personal Globe Inventory (PGI, Tracey, 2002), and the responses were examined with respect to their structure. Results of separate factor analyses demonstrated that there were three substantive factors: People/Things, Data/Ideas, and Prestige, similar to the structure of the PGI. The fit of the data to the PGI spherical model and the circular model of eight and six (i.e., RIASEC) types were examined using the randomized test of hypothesized order relations. The results demonstrated that the spherical model and the eight-type model fit the Chinese data equally well as data from the United States. However, unlike the Japanese results, Holland's six-type model fit the data as well as the eight-type model in the present study. No structure differences were found in the high school and the college samples or across gender within the high school and the college samples. The results support the structural validity of the PGI in Chinese applications.     

Who Wears the <Emphasis Type="Italic">Hijab</Emphasis>? Predictors of Veiling in Greater Jakarta

Indonesia is home to the world’s largest Muslim population. In contrast to much of the Middle East, veiling in Indonesia is neither a deeply rooted cultural practice, nor it is universally practised among Muslim women. Just 30 years ago it was rare to see an Indonesian woman wearing a hijab or veil. Today, veiling has become a relatively common practice, particularly among middle-class Muslim women living in urban areas. Although statistics on the prevalence of veiling are scant, the fact of growing use of headscarves is widely accepted in the literature. This paper examines sociodemographic correlates of veiling among young women in the capital region of Indonesia. We analyse a representative sample of 1443 Muslim women aged 20–34 in Greater Jakarta in 2010. About 26% of the women surveyed wore the veil. We found a moderately strong association between veiling and other measures of religiosity, including self-reported subjective religiosity and frequency of reading religious texts. Our multivariate analysis suggests a positive association between educational attainment and the likelihood of veiling among young Muslim women. In discussing these findings, we draw upon the qualitative component of our study and the literature on Islam, gender, and modernity in Indonesia. The paper highlights the difficulty encountered examining the practice of veiling as a binary choice, and as a measure of religiosity.     

A Stage Is a Stage Is a Stage: A Direct Comparison of Two Scoring Systems

L. Kohlberg (1969) argued that his moral stages captured a developmental sequence specific to the moral domain. To explore that contention, the author compared stage assignments obtained with the Standard Issue Scoring System (A. Colby & L. Kohlberg, 1987a, 1987b) and those obtained with a generalized content-independent stage-scoring system called the Hierarchical Complexity Scoring System (T. L. Dawson, 2002a), on 637 moral judgment interviews (participants' ages ranged from 5 to 86 years). The correlation between stage scores produced with the 2 systems was .88. Although standard issue scoring and hierarchical complexity scoring often awarded different scores up to Kohlberg's Moral Stage 2/3, from his Moral Stage 3 onward, scores awarded with the two systems predominantly agreed. The author explores the implications for developmental research.     

Response specificity in animal timing.

The stimuli that control responding in the peak procedure were investigated by training rats, in separate sessions, to make two different responses for food reinforcement. During one type of session, lever pressing was normally reinforced 32 s after the onset of a light. During the other type of session, chain pulling was normally reinforced either 8 s after the onset of one auditory cue or 128 s after the onset of a different auditory cue. For both types of sessions, only the appropriate manipulandum was available, and 20% of the trials lasted 240 s and involved no response-contingent consequences. Rats were then tested with the auditory cues in the presence of the lever and the light in the presence of the chain. If the time of reinforcement associated with each stimulus was learned, response rates should peak at these times during transfer testing. However, if a specific response pattern was learned for each stimulus, little transfer should occur. The results did not clearly support either prediction, leading to the conclusion that both a representation of the time of reinforcement and the rat's own behavior may control responding in this situation.     

Where Have All the Children Gone? Movement from Child to Adult Mental Health Systems

The mental health histories of the 448 children 15 and 16 years of age who were admitted to state-operated children's psychiatric inpatient services in New York during 1982 were reviewed for the 11 year period through April 1993, Thirty-three percent were served as adults (after age 18) in the state-operated adult civil mental health system; 42% of these individuals were still receiving services at the end of the period. 113 of the 146 individuals served as adults were served only in the civil system. Thirteen percent of the cohort received some of their mental health services as adults in the state-operated adult forensic mental health system due to criminal law involvement. This includes nine percent who received mental health services while they were inmates in state prisons. Twenty four of the 57 forensic clients received services as adults only in the forensic system. Diagnostic, demographic, and service history characteristics of the groups were compared to foster an early understanding of policy and programmatic issues related to movement from the child mental health system to the adult system. Baseline (1982) information was used to identify predictors of later service utilization.