The death of Abramo of Montecosaro

In this microhistory from 1553, set in Montecosaro, in east-central Italy, local officials, armed with their lords permission, set out to catch a Jewish banker in sexual traffic with a Christian. To bait their trap, they hire a local woman, who agrees to be found at night in the bankers house. Two years later, the entrappers, arrested, jailed, and tried for high-handed tactics, recount their version of the enterprise, and the lord, also jailed, gives his. The unfortunate banker, meanwhile, has died of prisons rigors, while the lord has pocketed his fat ransom. Though harsh, the state courts aim to punish all those guilty of justices miscarriage, including the rough handling of a Jewish victim. The article explores the attitudes of small-town Christians to the Jewish banker and strives to re-assemble the dialogue across the religious gap as the trap snaps shut. It also offers a well furbished narrative from a period for which few extended Jewish tales survive.     

Behavioral and physiological measures in the detection of concealed information

The authors examined the incremental validity of the reaction time (RT) measure beyond that of skin conductance response (SCR) in the detection of concealed information. Participants performed a Stroop-like task in which they named the color of critical and neutral words. Results show that the SCR highly differentiated between the relevant and neutral words. However, the RT demonstrated a significant differentiation only when the critical words denoted personally significant items (e.g., one's own name) and not when they denoted crime-relevant items related to a simulated crime. In both cases, combining the 2 measures yielded no advantage over the use of SCR alone. Thus, although behavioral measures may differentiate between relevant and neutral information in some cases, their practical use is questionable.     

Lethal sex: conditions of disclosure in counseling sexually active clients with HIV

Confidentiality in psychological counseling is necessary if clients are to feel comfortable in revealing their darkest secrets. But this bond of trust has its moral limits. These limits are crossed in some cases in which HIV positive clients are sexually active with unsuspecting third parties. Distinguishing between Type 1 and Type 2 cases, the author shows how he has used applied ethics in drafting and defending a model rule for the American Counseling Association's Code of Ethics that permits, and sometimes morally requires disclosure in the former cases, but not in the latter.     

Chaplain–Physician Consultancy: When Chaplains and Doctors Meet in the Clinical Context

This paper summarizes the perspectives of 327 Australian health care chaplains concerning their interaction with physicians within the clinical context. In general terms the findings indicated that nearly 90% of chaplains believed that it was part of their professional role to consult with physicians regarding patient/family issues. Differences of involvement between volunteer and staff chaplains, Catholic and Protestant, male and female chaplains and the type of chaplaincy training are noted, as are the perspectives of chaplaincy informants regarding their role in relation to physicians. Some implications of this study with respect to chaplaincy utility and training are noted.     

The attentional requirements of consciousness

It has been widely claimed that attention and awareness are doubly dissociable and that there is no causal relation between them. In support of this view are numerous claims of attention without awareness, and awareness without attention. Although there is evidence that attention can operate on or be drawn to unconscious stimuli, various recent findings demonstrate that there is no empirical support for awareness without attention. To properly test for awareness without attention, we propose that a stimulus be studied using a battery of tests based on diverse, mainstream paradigms from the current attention literature. When this type of analysis is performed, the evidence is fully consistent with a model in which attention is necessary, but not sufficient, for awareness.     

Increased semantic and repetition priming in schizophrenic patients

Positive and negative priming (PP and NP) in schizophrenia were studied with a lexical-decision task. Probe words, presented 800 ms after the response to the prime (containing a word and a nonword), were either identical to, semantically related to, or unrelated to the prime target word (PP) or to the prime distractor word (NP). Schizophrenic patients displayed stronger semantic and repetition PP than controls after controlling for their slower responses. Significant NP was observed in both groups for word repetition only. The PP findings contrast with results from studies with similar prime-probe intervals but without prime responses. It is proposed that schizophrenic patients, because of impaired (controlled) processes of response selection, strongly benefit from (or rely on) the automatic retrieval of processing episodes containing response information. Related findings indicating automatic response facilitation in schizophrenia are discussed.     

Effects of gravitational and optical stimulation on the perception of target elevation

To examine the combined effects of gravitational and optical stimulation on perceived target elevation, we independently altered gravitational-inertial force and both the orientation and the structure of a background visual array. While being exposed to 1.0, 1.5, or 2.0 Gz in the human centrifuge at NASA Ames Research Center, observers attempted to set a target to the apparent horizon. The target was viewed against the far wall of a box that was pitched at various angles. The box was brightly illuminated, had only its interior edges dimly illuminated, or was kept dark. Observers lowered their target settings as Gz was increased; this effect was weakened when the box was illuminated. Also, when the box was visible, settings were displaced in the same direction as that in which the box was pitched. We attribute our results to the combined influence of otolith-oculomotor mechanisms that underlie the elevator illusion and visual-oculomotor mechanisms (optostatic responses) that underlie the perceptual effects of viewing pitched visual arrays.     

Encoding of others’ beliefs without overt instruction

Under what conditions do people automatically encode and track the mental states of others? A recent investigation showed that when subjects are instructed to track the location of an object but are not instructed to track a belief about that location in a non-verbal false-belief task, they respond more slowly to questions about an agent’s belief, suggesting that belief information was not encoded or tracked automatically [Apperly, I. A., Riggs, K. J., Simpson, A., Samson, D., & Chiavarino, C. (2006). Is belief reasoning automatic? Psychological Science, 17, 841-844]. In the current experiments, we show that if belief probes occur closer in time to the events that signal the content of the agent’s false belief, responses to those probes are faster than responses to probes about reality, and as fast as responses to probes about belief when instructed to track them, suggesting (i) beliefs may get encoded automatically in response to certain cues and (ii) that belief information rapidly decays unless it is maintained via ‘top-down’ instructions.