Book reviews

The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World. John L. Esposito (Ed.), 1995. New York, Oxford, Oxford University Press. 4 vols, £295.00, ISBN 0 19 506613 8.

Deciphering the Signs of God: a phenomenological approach to Islam. Annemarie Schimmel, 1994. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press. 302 pp., hb. £39.50, ISBN 0 7486 0460 X.

The Rainbow of Faiths. John Hick, 1995. London, SCM Press. 160 pp., pb. £9.95, ISBN 0 334 02608 3.

Scholarly Approaches to Religion, Interreligious Perceptions, and Islam. Jacques Waahdenburg, (Ed.), 1995. Bern, Berlin, Frankfurt a. M., New York, Paris, Vienna, Peter Lang. 464 pp., hb. Sf76. (= £38), ISBN 3 906752 93 3.

Tariqat al‐Tahin al‐Balaghi wa al‐Tafsir. Roland Meynet, Louis Pouzet, Naila Farouki & Ahyaf Sinno, 1993. Beirut, Lebanon, Dar al‐Mashriq. 306 pp., pb. n.p., ISBN 2 7214 5003 4.

Religious Polemic and the Intellectual History of the Mozarabs, c. 1050–1200. T. Burman, 1994. Leiden, E. J. Brill. 407 pp., hb. np., ISBN 90 04 09910 7.

Justice, Courtesy and Love: theologians and missionaries encountering world religions, 1846–1914. Kenneth Cracknell, 1995. London, Epworth Press. 459 pp, pb. £20, ISBN 0 7162 0501 7.

Mission and Dialogue. Michael Nazir‐Ali, 1995. London, SPCK Press. 152 pp, pb., £8.99, ISBN 0 281 04810 X.

Early Mamluk Diplomacy (1260–1290): treaties of Baybars and Qalawun with Christian rulers. P. M. Holt, 1995. Leiden, E. J. Brill. 161 pp., hb. NLG 100, ISBN 90 04 10246 9.

The Search for Fundamentals: the process of modernization and the quest for meaning. Lieteke Van Vucht Tljssen, Jan Berting & Frank Lechner (Eds), 1995. Dordrecht, The Netherlands, Kluwer Academic Publishers. 293 pp., £80.00, 0 7923 3542 2.

Religion und prosoziales Verhalten Ein Symposion. Walter Kerber, (Ed.), 1995. Munchen, Kindt Verlag. 224 pp., hb. DM.36.00, ISBN 3 925412 18 2.

Nationalism, Ethnicity and Cultural Identity in Europe. (Comparative Studies in Migration and Ethnic Relations 1). Keebat von Benda‐Beckman & Maykel Verkuyten (Eds), 1995. Utrecht, European Research Centre on Migration and Ethnic Relations (ERCOMER). 199 pp., £11.95, ISBN 90 75719 01 9.

‘Das Projekt Weltethos’ in der Erziehung: Referate und Ergebnisse des Nurnberger Forums 1994. Johannes Lahnemann (Ed.), 1995. Hamburg, E.B. Verlag. 410 pp., pb. n.p., ISBN 3 923002 86 6.

Fundamentalism and Intellectuals in Egypt, 1973–1993. David Sagiv, 1995. London, Frank Cass. 188 pp., hb. £35, ISBN 0 7146 4581 8.

Being Human in Africa: toward an African Christian anthropology. Augustine C. Musopole, 1994. New York, Peter Lang. 261 pp., pb. n.p., ISBN 0 8204 2304 1.

Russians in the Former Soviet Republics. Paul Kolstoe with a contribution by Andrei Edemsky, 1995. London, Hurst & Company. 340 pp., hb. £35.00, ISBN 1 8065 206     

The influence of sex bias upon compliance with expert power

The present study evolved from the belief that sex bias influences the degree of expert power which the expert has in relation to the perceiver. Therefore, the influence of level of expertise, sex of the expert, sex of the influencee, and sex domination of the expert's occupation upon compliance was examined. Separate experiments were conducted for the male- and female-dominated occupations. Subjects' degree of compliance was measured by their responses to three recommendations contained in an in-basket. The three-way analyses of variance revealed that only expertise significantly affected subjects' degree of compliance. Results are discussed in terms of the presence of outside recognition of competence and legitimate power.     

Short-term memory and the nature of interference from concurrent shadowing

Trigrams were presented visually or auditorily and followed by a 12 s retention interval filled with shadowing numbers or letters. Auditory memory letters followed by letter shadowing were recalled less than auditory memory letters followed by number shadowing or visual memory letters followed by either type of shadowing. The latter three conditions did not differ among themselves. An analysis of the recall intrusions suggested that forgetting of auditory memory letters followed by letter shadowing was caused mainly by a confusion between covert rehearsals and shadowing activity, while forgetting in the other three conditions was caused primarily by proactive interference from earlier memory trials.     

Life and job satisfaction: Is the job central?

The nature of the causal relationship between life and job satisfaction in a sample of males and females working in a variety of jobs was investigated. Results suggest that the life satisfaction causes job satisfaction hypothesis is more tenable than the reverse.     

Minor illness and social behavior of infants and caregivers

Fourteen infants attending day care were observed during the first year of life when well and during acute minor illnesses. Comparisons of behavior during 46 afebrile illnesses and a like number of well observations revealed no differences in infant or caregiver behavior. During 24 febrile illness observations, however, infants moved less, contacted toys less, were in closer proximity to teachers, cried more, and looked at teachers more. During a subset of these febrile illnesses, in which teachers recognized that infants were ill, teachers vocalized, gave toys, looked at, touched, held, and fed infants more than when infants were well. Analysis of teacher behavior during infant crying demonstrated that infant cries played an important role in eliciting social responses from teachers during febrile illness. These results suggest that both caregiver perception of illness state and illness-induced changes in infant behavior contribute to increased sociability by caregivers during acute febrile illness.     

Recency and lexical preferences in Spanish

One experiment provided evidence in support of Gibson, Pearlmutter, Canseco-Gonzalez, and Hickok's (1996) claim that a recency preference applies to Spanish relative clause attachments, contrary to the claim made by Cuetos and Mitchell (1988). Spanish speakers read stimuli involving either two or three potential attachment sites in which the same lexical content of the two-site conditions appeared in a different structural configuration in the three-site conditions. High attachment was easier than low attachment when only two sites were present, but low attachment was preferred over high attachment, which was in turn preferred over middle attachment, when three sites were present. The experiment replicated earlier results and showed that (1) attachment preferences are determined in part by a preference to attach recently/low, and (2) lexical biases are insufficient to explain attachment preferences.     

Visual–perceptual and cognitive differences between expert,intermediate, and novice snooker players

The performance of seven expert, seven intermediate, and 15 novice snooker players was compared on a range of general visual tests and sport-specific perceptual and cognitive tests in an attempt to determine the locus of the expert advantage. No significant expert-novice differences were apparent on standard optometric tests of acuity, ocular muscle balance, colour vision, and depth perception, nor on the relative frequency of unilateral and cros-lateral eye-hand dominances. Experts, however, were found to be superior in their ability to both recall and recognize rapidly-presented slides depicting normal game situations, but were no better than novices in recalling information from slides in which the balls were arranged randomly on the table. The expert group's superiority on the perceptual recall and recognition tasks was consistent with a deeper level of encoding for structured (meaningful) material. Experts were also shown, through the use of thinking-aloud and evaluation paradigms, to use a greater depth of forward planning in choosing appropriate shot options and to evaluate existing situations with greater accuracy, discriminability, and prospective planing than did novices. The cognitive advantage is shown to be a potential contributor but not a total explanation of the superior performance of the experts on the perceptual tasks. The findings of this study are consistent with existing works on expertise in board games and ‘open’ skill sports in indicating that the expert's advantage is not a general but a specific one, arising not from physical capacities but from acquired processing strategies.     

Confidentiality Limits With Clients Who Have HIV: A Review of Ethical and Legal Guidelines and Professional Policies

The publication of the first counseling articles addressing confidentiality limits of clients who have HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) and continue to be sexually active with an uninformed partner occurred 4 years ago. Since that time, dialogue about whether a helping professional may ethically and legally breach confidentiality has not resolved the dilemma but instead has created more questions and controversy for counselors. In this article the authors highlight the barrage of ethical issues regarding HIV and Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AlDS), review ethical and legal guidelines pertaining to HIV and AIDS and confidentiality, summarize HIV and AIDS confidentiality policies of the major helping professional organizations, articulate questions that contribute to the confidentiality dilemmas, and challenge the American Counseling Association (ACA), formerly the American Association for Counseling and Development (AACD), to develop specific guidelines for counselors.     

On time differences in searching for letters in words and nonwords: Do they emerge during the initial encoding or the subsequent scan?

Krueger (1970a, 1970b, 1982) has demonstrated that subjects can search for target letters within words faster than they can complete an equivalent search through nonwords, and he further demonstrated that the effect did not arise during the comparison stage. The present study involved three experiments in which the usual word advantage disappeared either when subjects knew where within a display the target item would appear (i.e., it was always the first letter), or when all the component letters were encoded into memory before the task began (i.e., a memory-search task). These data, in conjunction with Krueger's, where interpreted as localizing at least one (and possibly the only) source of the word-nonword difference in this task to the events that occur during the item-to-item transitions subjects make when scanning the letter arrays. That is, these transitions are faster for words than nonwords, and it was suggested that the time difference may emerge because although all the letters from within a word appear to be available in memory before the scan begins, this seems not to be true for consonant arrays. Given that this is the case, part of the word-nonword difference may be attributable to subsequent encoding events that would be needed for the consonant arrays as the scan moves from letter to letter.