Attachment, Social Support, and Perceived Mental Health of Adult Dog Walkers: What Does Age Have to Do With It?

In part of a larger pilot study of dog walking as a physical activity intervention we assessed levels of attachment, social supports, and perceived mental health of 75 dog owners, identified through a tertiary- care veterinary hospital. Owners completed the Medical Outcomes Study (MOS) Social Support Survey, mental health component of the Short-Form-12 (SF-12) Health Survey, and the Lexington Attachment to Pets Scale (LAPS). Of particular interest was that younger owners had stronger attachments to their dogs (r = -.488;p \u3c.001) and less social support (r = .269;p =.021). Our study suggests the importance of companion animals for social support, particularly for those without close friends/relatives. For younger owners, our study reveals vulnerabilities in support networks that may warrant referrals to human helping professionals. We suggest the use of Carstensen\u27s Socioemotional Selectivity Theory as an interpretive framework to underscore the importance of including companion animals as part of the human social convoy, especially in terms of providing affectionate and interactional social support

Distinct H3F3A and H3F3B driver mutations define chondroblastoma and giant cell tumor of bone

It is recognized that some mutated cancer genes contribute to the development of many cancer types, whereas others are cancer type specific. For genes that are mutated in multiple cancer classes, mutations are usually similar in the different affected cancer types. Here, however, we report exquisite tumor type specificity for different histone H3.3 driver alterations. In 73 of 77 cases of chondroblastoma (95%), we found p.Lys36Met alterations predominantly encoded in H3F3B, which is one of two genes for histone H3.3. In contrast, in 92% (49/53) of giant cell tumors of bone, we found histone H3.3 alterations exclusively in H3F3A, leading to p.Gly34Trp or, in one case, p.Gly34Leu alterations. The mutations were restricted to the stromal cell population and were not detected in osteoclasts or their precursors. In the context of previously reported H3F3A mutations encoding p.Lys27Met and p.Gly34Arg or p.Gly34Val alterations in childhood brain tumors, a remarkable picture of tumor type specificity for histone H3.3 driver alterations emerges, indicating that histone H3.3 residues, mutations and genes have distinct functions

Competing understandings of the intersection between society and environment in the climate change debate

The failure of the Copenhagen Conference to produce a legally binding agreement marks an impasse. It also poses difficulties for sociology. This paper will not attempt to directly explain why no agreement could be reached in Copenhagen. Rather, it will sketch the sociological difficulties faced by this and other such mechanisms to use politics and law to facilitate the long term stability of the interface between natural environments and modern societies. In particular, the paper will indicate the role of each of science, morality, law, politics, and economy in producing competing understandings of „environment‟ and „society‟, competing understandings which are drawn on by many participants in the climate change debate. Our appreciation of how and why it presents a crisis, how it might have occurred, its consequences, and the fact that it is an environmental problem is a product of a certain type of specifically „environmental‟ thinking. Our project is to undertake a close exposition of how various understandings of the potential threat of climate change are generated

Legal and political challenges of governing the environment and climate change: Ruling nature

The environment has not always been protected by law. It was not until the middle of the 20th century that ‘the environment’ came to be understood as an entity in need of special care, and the law-politics duo firmly fixed its focus on this issue.In this book Wickham and Goodie tell the story of how law and politics first came upon the environment as an object in need of special attention. They outline the unlikely intersection of aesthetics and science that made ‘the environment’ into the matter of great concern it is today. The book describes the way private common-law strategies and public-law legislative strategies have approached the task of protecting the environment, and explore the greatest environmental challenge to have so far confronted environmental law and politics; the threat of global climate change. The book offers descriptions of many of the strategies being deployed to meet this challenge and present some troubling assessments of them.The book will be of great interest to students, teachers, and researchers of environmental law, socio-legal studies, environmental studies, and political theory

Calculating 'public interest': Common law and the legal governance of the environment

Drawing inspiration from O'Malley's very recent attempt to introduce greater subtlety into governmentality thinking about the operation of the common law of contract (O'Malley, 2000), this article seeks to explore some of the nuances of the common law's way of calculating interests. O'Malley argues that the law of contract developed in a more pragmatic fashion than an understanding of law within liberal economic theory allows. He says that contract law developed on the basis of the force of uncertainty and practical experience, as much as it did on the basis of the abstract and quantifiable calculations of the rational risk manager - a 'pragmatic and situational' form of calculation rather than an rational, abstract one (O'Malley, 2000: 477-8). We argue, using mainly Australian examples concerned with the legal governance of the environment, that non-pecuniary public interests are also subject to this type of 'pragmatic and situated' calculation within the common law, one we refer to as 'rhetorical'

The great governmental challenge of climate change

The recently released fifth report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stresses the connection between climate change and severe weather events around the world, including devastating bushfires in places such as Australia. But what does this actually mean for governments? In the first decade of the 21st century many governments around the world unofficially competed with one another to show how serious they were about dealing with the threat of climate change. Perhaps the pithiest entry in this competition was this newsworthy slogan offered in 2007 by the soon-to-be Prime Minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd

The state and civility: a crucial nexus

The study of civility is branching out. A wide range of new studies have been published in the last twenty years. While the increase in the diversity of approaches usefully expands the scope of the concept, it is also a cause for concern. Much of the new work pays little attention to civility’s complex history as a practice and simply assumes its fundamental capacity to lead interaction between human beings in a peaceful direction, leaving this body of work in no position to fully appreciate the crucial role of the state. Our main argument here is that civility emerged alongside the modern state in early-modern Europe to form an ongoing state–civility nexus, a nexus by which the state produces and maintains conditions that allow civility to flourish, in turn allowing civility to help the state maintain itself, particularly by restraining the state’s raw power. We pursue this argument by exploring two sets of writings. One set is composed of work by early-modern writers, especially Thomas Hobbes, with some attention paid to four others: Justus Lipsius, Jean Bodin, Samuel Pufendorf, and Christian Thomasius. The second set is composed of work by twentieth-century writers, especially Norbert Elias, with some attention paid to two others: Max Weber and Edward Shils

The Use of Base Rate Information as a Function of Experienced Consistency

Three experiments examine the effect of base rate consistency under direct experience. Base rate consistency was manipulated by blocking trials and setting base rate choice reinforcement to be either consistent or inconsistent across trial blocks. Experiment 1 shows that, contrary to the usual finding, participants use base rate information more than individuating information when it is consistent, but less when it is inconsistent. In Experiment 2, this effect was replicated, and transferred in verbal questions posed subsequently. Despite experience with consistent base rates increasing sensitivity to base rates in word problems, verbal responses were far from normative. In Experiment 3, participants’ use of base rates was once again moderated by its consistency, but this effect was itself moderated by the diagnosticity of base rate information. Participants were highly accurate in estimating experienced base rates. These studies demonstrate that base rate usage is complex and a function of how base rates are presented (experienced versus summary statistics) and response format (choice proportions versus probability estimates). Knowledge of base rates was insufficient for proper usage in verbal word problems. Although choice proportions showed a sophisticated sensitivity to experienced base rate information, participants seemed unable to demonstrate a similar sophistication when given typical word problems indicating that base rate neglect is a function of information representation and not an inherent processing bias. Copyright Springer 2005base rate neglect, decision making, learning, choice, direct experience, diagnosticity,