Animals and Other People: Literary Forms and Living Beings in the Long Eighteenth Century. By Heather Keenleyside. (review)

This is a review of Animals and Other People: Literary Forms and Living Beings in the Long Eighteenth Century by Heather Keenleyside. It is to be published by Modern Language Review. Accepted for publication in August 2017

Queering Agatha Christie: Revisiting the Golden Age of Detective Fiction.

This is a review of 'Queering Agatha Christie: Revisiting the Golden Age of Detective Fiction' by J.C. Bernthal to be published in Modern Language Review. Submitted and accepted in April 2017

The "Caradoc Affair": An Argument for an Ethics of Place

This article develops an ethical reading of the work of Caradoc Evans focusing on My People and Taffy. My aim is to show that an ethical reading which assumes a microcosmopolitan perspective can show that the ‘Caradoc Affair’, the outrage with which Evans’s early work was received in Wales, arose from a misreading of My People. The ‘Caradoc Affair’ then acquired a life of its own and was at least partly determined by the commercial interests of the daily press, particularly the The Western Mail. Moreover, an ethical reading can show why Evans’s texts ultimately fail to engage with the Wales of his time in a meaningful way despite the great impact he had on generations of Welsh writers that followed, most notably on Dylan Thomas

The Pervasive Problem of Post Hoc Data Selection in Studies on Unconscious Processing

Studies on unconscious mental processes typically require that participants are unaware of some information (e.g., a visual stimulus). An important methodological question in this field of research is how to deal with data from participants who become aware of the critical stimulus according to some measure of awareness. While it has previously been argued that the post hoc selection of participants dependent on an awareness measure may often result in regression-to-the-mean artifacts (Shanks, 2017), a recent article (Sklar et al., 2021) challenged this conclusion claiming that the consideration of this statistical artifact might lead to unjustified rejections of true unconscious influences. In this reply, we explain this pervasive statistical problem with a basic and concrete example, show that Sklar et al. fundamentally mischaracterize it, and then refute the argument that the influence of the artifact has previously been overestimated. We conclude that, without safeguards, the method of post hoc data selection should never be employed in studies on unconscious processing

"Berlin wählt - ich auch!"

"BERLIN WÄHLT - ICH AUCH!" "Berlin wählt - ich auch!" / Ihden-Rothkirch, Silke (Rights reserved) ( -

Access to awareness of direct gaze is related to autistic traits

Background: The atypical processing of eye contact is a characteristic hallmark of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The severity of these symptoms, however, is thought to lie on a continuum that extends into the typical population. While behavioural evidence shows that differences in social cognitive tasks in typically developed (TD) adults are related to the levels of autistic-like traits, it remains unknown whether such a relation exists for the sensitivity to direct gaze.; Methods: In two experiments, we measured reaction times to detect the faces with direct and averted gaze, suppressed from awareness, i.e. the access to awareness. In experiment 1, we tested N = 19 clinically diagnosed adults with ASD and N = 22 TD matched controls, while in experiment 2, we tested an independent sample of N = 20 TD adults.; Results: In line with the literature, experiment 1 showed preferential processing of direct gaze in the TD group but not in the ASD group. Importantly, we found a linear relationship in both experiments between the levels of autistic traits within the groups of TD participants and their sensitivity to direct gaze: with increasing autistic characteristics, there was a decrease in sensitivity to direct gaze.; Conclusion: These results provide the first evidence that differences in gaze processing and the sensitivity to direct gaze are already present in individuals with subclinical levels of autistic traits. Furthermore, they lend support to the continuum view of the disorder and could potentially help in an earlier diagnosis of individuals at high risk for autism.Peer Reviewe

A non-destructive view with X-rays into the strain state of bronze axes.

In this paper we present a new approach using highly surface sensitive X-ray diffraction methods for archaeometrical investigation highlighted on the Neolithic Axe of Ahneby. Applying the sin2Ψ-method with a scintillation detector and a MAXIM camera setup, both usually applied for material strain analysis on modern metal fabrics. We can distinguish between different production states of bronze axes: Cast, forged and tempered. The method can be applied as a local probe of some 100th of μm2 or integrative on a square centimeter surface area. We applied established synchrotron radiation based methods of material strain mapping and diffraction on a Neolithic bronze axe as well as replicated material for noninvasive analysis. The main goal of the described investigations was to identify the effects upon the bronze objects of post cast surface treatment with stone tools and of heat treatment