The once and future Jew: The Croxton Play of the Sacrament, little Robert of Bury and historical memory

The Jews who purchase and attack the host in the fifteenth-century East Anglian drama, the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, have long been regarded by critics as referents to Lollards or to doubters more generally, not to Jews. However, the play does refer to the history of Jews in Bury St. Edmunds, where, most likely, it was performed, and more specifically, it refers to the 1181 ritual murder accusation surrounding Little Robert of Bury. This accusation was commemorated in a variety of forms in Bury well into the fifteenth century. Further, in its representation of host desecration as a literal reenactment of the Passion, the play creates a temporal mode in which the Jews re-enact the Passion in the present, just as the Mass is a re-enactment of the Crucifixion. The play simultaneously makes the audience witness to the murder of little Robert and to the Crucifixion, with both existing in a kind of “eternal present,” a temporality central to the Mass and also to related late-medieval English devotional practices. The story of little Robert comes to exist not only in historical memory, but also in the eternal present in which the Crucifixion and its re-enactments are joined. This powerful temporality creates a conception of the Jew as perpetual murderer, guilty not only of crucifying Christ in the historical past, but in the present, and until the Parousia in the future, thus enabling a particular aspect of the negative stereotype of “the Jew,” the perpetually present enemy, ever plotting against Christ and Christendom. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Reviews: Books, Theater, and Painting

JUNG AND THE POSTMODERN: THE INTERPRETATION OF REALITIES. By Christopher Hauke. 304 pp. London & Philadelphia: Routledge, 2000. THE FASHIONING OF ANGELS: PARTNERSHIP AS SPIRITUAL PRACTICE. By Stephen and Robin Larsen. pp. Chrysalis Books, 2000, $19.95. CHILDREN IN THERAPY: USING THE FAMILY AS A RESOURCE. Edited by C. Everett Bailey. 529 pp. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000. $45.00. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION AND COPING: THEORY, RESEARCH, PRACTICE. By Kenneth I. Pargament. New York: Guilford Press, 1997. $50.00. SOUL WILDERNESS: A DESERT SPIRITUALITY. By Kerry Walters. 153pp. New York/Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 2001. $12.95. SOUL MAKING: THE DESERT WAY OF SPIRITUALITY. By Alan Jones. 215 pp. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1985. $16.00. Theater: Words of Albert Schweitzer and the Music of Bach. Painting: Vermeer and the Delft School     

Causal attributions from adolescence through adulthood

Attributional reasoning for events varying on level of informational ambiguity and context (relationship, achievement) were examined from adolescence through older adulthood. Participants rated the degree to which a cause of an event was a function of the primary character, situation, or a combination of these; wrote essays assessing underlying reasons for attributions; and responded to ego level, attributional style, and intolerance for ambiguity questionnaires. Older age groups made more interactive (relativistic) attributional ratings than did younger age groups for ambiguous events. Compared to adult and middle-aged adults, older women demonstrated a drop in dialectical attributional reasoning as assessed by the essays. Ego level, tolerance for ambiguity, and verbal ability predicted more dialectical attributional reasoning above and beyond the effects of age.     

Measurement tool for preoperative anxiety in young children: The yale preoperative anxiety scale

To develop a preoperative anxiety scale (YPAS) for children undergoing surgery, 21 specific behaviors indicating anxiety were defined within five domains (activity, emotional expressivity, state of arousal, vocalization, and use of adults). A reliability Kappa analysis revealed that inter-observer agreement ranged from .66 to .94, while intra-observer Kappa ranged from .66 to .91. Validity analysis between a Visual Analog Scale and the YPAS revealed an r of .59 for entering the operating room. Multiserial analysis comparing the YPAS to the Vernon Anxiety Scale ranged from .61 to .64. Showing good to excellent observer reliability and validity, the YPAS proves to be an appropriate tool for studying children's responses in preoperative settings. As such, the new assessment instrument should be of interest to clinical and research neuropsychologists who need to assess a child's anxiety level prior to the undertaking of a given surgical procedure.     

Memorial consequences of multiple-choice testing on immediate and delayed tests

Multiple-choice testing has both positive and negative consequences for performance on later tests. Prior testing increases the number of questions answered correctly on a later test but also increases the likelihood that questions will be answered with lures from the previous multiple-choice test (Roediger & Marsh, 2005). Prior research has shown that the positive effects of testing persist over a delay, but no one has examined the durability of the negative effects of testing. To address this, subjects took multiple-choice and cued recall tests (on subsets of questions) both immediately and a week after studying. Although delay reduced both the positive and negative testing effects, both still occurred after 1 week, especially if the multiple-choice test had also been delayed. These results are consistent with the argument that recollection underlies both the positive and negative testing effects.     

Memory for reward location is enhanced even though acetylcholine efflux within the amygdala is impaired in rats with damage to the diencephalon produced by thiamine deficiency

Sleep facilitates declarative memory processing. However, we know little about whether sleep plays a role in the processing of a fundamental feature of declarative memory, relational memory – the flexible representation of items not directly learned prior to sleep. Thirty-one healthy participants first learned at 12 pm two sets of face–object photograph pairs (direct associative memory), in which the objects in each pair were common to both lists, but paired with two different faces. Participants either were given approximately 90 min to have a NREM-only daytime nap (n = 14) or an equivalent waking period (n = 17). At 4:30 pm, participants who napped demonstrated significantly better retention of direct associative memory, as well as better performance on a surprise task assessing their relational memory, in which participants had to associate the two faces previously paired with the same object during learning. Particularly noteworthy, relational memory performance was correlated with the amount of NREM sleep during the nap, with only slow-wave sleep predicting relational memory performance. Sleep stage data did not correlate with direct associative memory retention. These results suggest an active role for sleep in facilitating multiple processes that are not limited to the mere strengthening of rote memories, but also the binding of items that were not directly learned together, reorganizing them for flexible use at a later time.     

Deontic and epistemic reasoning in children

It is widely accepted that adults show an advantage for deontic over epistemic reasoning. Two published studies (Cummins, 1996b; Harris and Núñez, 1996, Experiment 4) found evidence of this “deontic advantage” in preschool-aged children and are frequently cited as evidence that preschoolers show the same deontic advantage as adults. However, neither study has been replicated, and it is not clear from either study that preschoolers were showing the deontic advantage under the same conditions as adults. The current research investigated these issues. Experiment 1 attempted to replicate both Cummins’s and Harris and Núñez’s studies with 3- and 4-year-olds (N = 56), replicating the former with 4-year-olds and the latter with both 3- and 4-year-olds. Experiment 2 modified Cummins’s task to remove the contextual differences between conditions, making it more similar to adult tasks, finding that 4-year-olds (n = 16) show no evidence of the deontic advantage when no authority figure is present in the deontic condition, whereas both 7-year-olds (n = 16) and adults (n = 28) do. Experiment 3 removed the authority figure from the deontic condition in Harris and Núñez’s task, again finding that 3- and 4-year-olds (N = 28) show no evidence of the deontic advantage under these conditions. These results suggest that for preschoolers, the deontic advantage is reliant on particular contextual cues such as the presence of an authority figure, in the deontic condition. By 7 years of age, however, children are reasoning like adults and show evidence of the advantage when no such contextual cues are present.     

What You Feel Influences What You See: The Role of Affective Feelings in Resolving Binocular Rivalry

It seems obvious that what you see influences what you feel, but what if the opposite were also true? What if how you feel can shape your visual experience? In this experiment, we demonstrate that the affective state of a perceiver influences the contents of visual awareness. Participants received positive, negative, and neutral affect inductions and then completed a series of binocular rivalry trials in which a face (smiling, scowling, or neutral) was presented to one eye and a house to the other. The percepts “competed” for dominance in visual consciousness. We found, as predicted, that all faces (smiling, scowling, and neutral) were dominant for longer when perceivers experienced unpleasant affect compared to when they were in a neutral state (a social vigilance effect), although scowling faces increased their dominance when perceivers felt unpleasant (a relative negative congruence effect). Relatively speaking, smiling faces increased their dominance more when perceivers were experiencing pleasant affect (a positive congruence effect). These findings illustrate that the affective state of a perceiver serves as a context that influences the contents of consciousness.     

Seeing failure in your life: Imagery perspective determines whether self-esteem shapes reactions to recalled and imagined failure

The present research reveals that when it comes to recalling and imagining failure in one's life, changing how one looks at the event can change its impact on well-being; however, the nature of the effect depends on an aspect of one's self-concept, namely, self-esteem. Five studies measured or manipulated the visual perspective (internal first-person vs. external third-person) individuals used to mentally image recalled or imagined personal failures. It has been proposed that imagery perspective determines whether people's reactions to an event are shaped bottom-up by concrete features of the event (first-person) or top-down by their self-concept (third-person; L. K. Libby & R. P. Eibach, 2011b). Evidence suggests that differences in the self-concepts of individuals with low and high self-esteem (LSEs and HSEs) are responsible for self-esteem differences in reaction to failure, leading LSEs to have more negative thoughts and feelings about themselves (e.g., M. H. Kernis, J. Brockner, & B. S. Frankel, 1989). Thus, the authors predicted, and found, that low self-esteem was associated with greater overgeneralization--operationalized as negativity in accessible self-knowledge and feelings of shame--only when participants had pictured failure from the third-person perspective and not from the first-person. Further, picturing failure from the third-person, rather than first-person, perspective, increased shame and the negativity of accessible knowledge among LSEs, whereas it decreased shame among HSEs. Results help to distinguish between different theoretical accounts of how imagery perspective functions and have implications for the study of top-down and bottom-up influences on self-judgment and emotion, as well as for the role of perspective and abstraction in coping.     

Voice versus loyalty: Self-construals and responses to dissatisfaction in romantic relationships

Two studies examined the relationship between self-construals and active versus passive strategies for dealing with dissatisfaction in romantic relationships. In Study 1, chronic differences in self-construals were measured and in Study 2, self-construals were manipulated via a priming technique. In both studies, an independent self-construal was related to the active, constructive response of voice (expressing one’s dissatisfaction with the intent of improving the relationship). In contrast, an interdependent self-construal was related to the passive, constructive response of loyalty (optimistically waiting for conditions to improve). Implications of self-construals for the dynamics of close relationships are discussed.