Effects of the one-way mirror on family therapy

The one-way screen often used in family therapy is usually a mirror and may have unsuspected effects, ensuring that clients' behaviour in therapy reflects social acceptability and personal values, rather than their usual interactions.     

Direct assessment of qualia in a blindsight participant

Experimenters generally infer whether participants have visual experiences based on metacognitive responses. We showed a well-studied blindsight participant, GY, several definitions of the term "qualia" and then questioned him about whether he felt or he experienced qualia in his normal and blind fields. We found, contrary to others who have used different methods for measuring qualia, that GY does not have qualia for stationary stimuli in his blind field. This novel method for directly assessing qualia embraces the idea that experiences should be related by the experiencer, not the experimenter.     

Luther's Small and Large Catechisms: Defining and Confessing Christian Faith From the Centre in a Religiously Plural World

Abstract : In this article, the author argues that in his Small and Large Catechisms, which were both written in 1529, Martin Luther centres the Christian faith in a way that others can recognise as authentic and faithful to the Gospel vis‐à‐vis the relativism that is posited as the appropriate Christian articulation of the Gospel in a world of religious diversity. Luther's non‐negotiable centring on God for us in Jesus Christ, through whom God is uniquely and decisively revealed, speaks to the contemporary intra‐Christian and inter‐religious questions. The author finds evangelical and persuasive resonance in Lesslie Newbigin's call to indwell the Christian story and George Lindbeck's argument to attend to the grammar of the faith.     

Articulating Christian doctrine in the pluralistic world of the twenty-first century

The reviewer offers an appreciative theological summary of Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen's monumental text, Christian Theology in the Pluralistic World: A Global Introduction. Persaud calls attention to the trinitariancentre of Kärkkäinen's theological articulation, which is the basis for Kärkkäinen's openness to finding and naming commonalities and differences between biblical, creedal, confessional Christianity and each of the two other Abrahamic faiths (Judaism and Islam) and two Asiatic faiths (Hinduism and Buddhism). The reviewer calls for further engagement with the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (31 October 1999), in relation to the pressing question of religious conversion in today's pluralistic world.     

Wagering demonstrates subconscious processing in a binary exclusion task

We briefly presented either the letter 'b' or the letter 'h' to participants who were instructed to respond by saying the letter that was not shown. This binary version of the exclusion task avoids problems with assessing baseline completion rates. When the letters were shown for 5-10 ms participants erroneously responded with the shown letter at a rate greater than chance. They were capable of following the instructions when the letter was shown for longer (15 ms). Given the chance to wager low or high on their choices after short duration stimuli, participants declined to wager high even when they were correct. Taken together these results suggest that the briefly presented stimuli were processed subconsciously.     

Eggs of a female Japanese quail are more likely to be fertilized by a male that she prefers

Male Japanese quail (Coturnix japonica) that conspecific females preferred in a 10-min, forced-choice test of affiliative preference were more likely than were males not preferred in such a test to fertilize females' eggs when subsequently mated with them, although preferred and nonpreferred males mated equally often with females. Further, the probability that a nonpreferred male would fertilize a female's eggs was significantly increased if she watched while he courted and mated with another female. The results indicate that in Japanese quail (a) affiliative preference reliably predicts females' choices of fathers for their offspring and (b) females may have some degree of control over whether the males with whom they mate actually fertilize their eggs.