Définir ou détecter des pathologies ? Utilisation et interprétation des scores seuils à la lumière du débat dimensions/catégories

A number of psychometric tests are aimed at locating the performance of an individual along a continuous range that goes from normal to worrying. In a different paradigm, there are tests whose goal is to assess whether or not an individual is healthy with respect to a psychological, psychiatric or neurological pathology that is defined independently from the test itself. The former rely on a dimensional concept of psychopathologies; the latter imply a categorical concept. The former require to compare the performance of the individual to a standard sample that is representative of the general population; the latter involve a standard sample representative of the healthy population only. The former might imply the use of a cut-off score to indicate that a certain degree of rarity of the performance has been reached, while the latter must involve a cut-off score to make a decision (whether the individual belongs to the “healthy” or “pathological” category), a score that is most often set so as to control the false-positive rate in making this decision. In the former paradigm, the cut-off score defines or contributes to define the pathology. In the latter, it only helps detecting it. This article aims at making clear the difference between these two realms and highlight their practical as well as theoretical impact on psychological practice.     

Égalité professionnelle et genre en contexte : l’exemple des chef.fes d’établissement du secondaire

In the public service, the elementary and secondary education sector is highly feminised. Our object of study is related to these issues of professional equality within the national education system (a highly feminised context) and aims to explore the discourse held by management staff (especially women) on the perception (or not) of gender inequalities in access to managerial positions (subjective perception of inequalities). The results make it possible first of all to show the heterogeneity of the responses of staff (including women) on questions of perceived equality. Comparatively, a majority of the interviewees emphasised the difficulties in articulating different life times (professional, family, personal). They also emphasised the availability and commitment required to carry out the function of head teacher. And, in this respect, there seems to be relative agreement between the women and men who responded (although, from a quantitative point of view, more women mentioned these aspects). The fields of application of this research should be linked to equality policies in the public service and action plans for gender equality.     

L’expertise médicale au temps des pandémies : l’exemple des cancers

Medical law suits were interrupted during the COVID-19 pandemia and judicial process will come shortly back to the normal. Pandemia induced delays in the cancer diagnosis and treatment. These modifications were validated by expert consensus from the medical societies. However in the coming years it is highly possible that patients think they were victims of a “loss of chance” and ask for a compensation. The various situations in which physicians can be involved are described and recommendations for the management of medical charts are discussed.     

Psychologie communautaire et recherche : l’exemple du projet EMILIA

The development of community psychology has also had significant implications in the area of evaluation and research methodology. The empowerment principle, that is, giving users the means to control their health and to make their own health decisions, has important implications for the choice of evaluation strategies for both individual therapeutic acts as well as for public health programmes. If the user's potential expertise in the health area is to be fully acknowledged, how is this to be done with regard to research? How can users become not only actors of their own health, but also play an active role in research and health evaluation? The article gives an overview of research strategies based on community psychology principles, with a particular emphasis on action research and participative-action research. The example of a multisite European project on empowering mental-health service users to access life-long learning and employment, currently underway in Paris, is presented to illustrate these community research methods.     

Stabilité à long terme des scores du WISC-IV : forces et faiblesses personnelles

Intelligence is considered as a stable trait over time; psychologists make predictions about the future performance of the child from the interpretation of the WISC-IV scores. However, stability at interindividual level does not necessarily imply stability at intra-individual level. By a test-retest procedure, the stability of categories that classify the performances, and the stability of the personal strengths and personal weaknesses are evaluated on a sample of 277 children aged from seven to 12 years. Categorical stability reveals that the classification into seven categories proposed by the designers of the WISC-IV does not allow reliable predictions. The stability of personal strengths and personal weaknesses is unsatisfactory for the different index scores.     

Étude de l’avis du défenseur des Droits sur l’interprétation de l’article L.2141-11 du Code de la santé publique

To acknowledge the article L2141-11 CSP to be interpreted as allowing transsexual persons, who engaged themselves in a male-to-female transition path, to benefit from gametes’ self-conservation, the French Ombudsman requests that any future usages should not be taken into account in any submission analysis. This theoretical position implies two main criticisms. On one hand, it does not comply with the literal meaning and the intended objective of article L2141-11 CSP which, at contrary, imposes to check both of the origin of predictable infertility and the aim of gametes’ self-conservation. On the other hand, it refrains from considering what lies under the request by minimizing its societal background meaning the gender recognition instead of sexed reality.     

L’habilitation des salariés : le rôle du supérieur et des collègues

Organizational initiatives to empower employees have limited success if they are supported only by top managers. The goal of this study is to examine how two actors in the workers’ proximal social environment, the supervisor and colleagues, contribute to employee empowerment. A questionnaire study was conducted with a sample of 418 workers relying both on psychological and behavioral self-report measures of employee empowerment. Multiple regressions revealed that contributions from the supervisor and colleagues are distinct, additive and interact in a synergic way to increase employee empowerment. These results suggest that it is important to foster favorable conditions in the workers’ proximal social environment to instill employee empowerment.     

Le développement contemporain des régimes juridiques des conflits d’intérêts : l’exemple du secteur de la santé

The conceptualization of conflicts of interests and deployment of their regulatory systems are primarily modes of economic and managerial health control. When did the legal regime of conflicts of interests, which formalizes the process, clash with the conditions of professional practice? Not all assumptions of friction or opposition of interests necessarily constitute a conflict of interests. All public sector professionals have interests but not all their interests generate conflicts. The aim of public declaration of interests is to reveal the relations of interest in order to allay suspicion. Most frequently in the form of soft law system, the declaration of interests is a way of warning about the existence of a “grey zone” or time of deontological risk. It was changed by the law of 29 December 2011     

Les publications des experts médicaux : l’exemple de l’anesthésie-réanimation

Forensic expertise becomes dominant in our society. Several reports questioned the competence of medical experts. We analysed the scientific competence of the 136 experts in Anaesthesia, Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine from senior courts in France. For that purpose, we made the choice of the H-Index and the number of scientific publications as markers of quality, using Google Scholar and PubMed databases. Thirty-five percent of experts have an H-Index equal to zero and 27 % never published. Out of the 104 experts who published at least one scientific article, 27 (26 %) did not publish for at least 10 years. The present study illustrates the great heterogeneity of the medical expert population regarding our criterions of judgement. This questions the selection and the operating mode of legal experts. There is a major difference with the selection process performed by the French Conciliation and Compensation Commissions. We propose that the official scholarly societies should be consulted during the appointment process.     

L’évaluation thérapeutique et collaborative : preuves empiriques

This paper covers the empirical research that addressed utility and effectiveness of therapeutic assessment or of its components (i.e., providing individualize feedback to clients). Studies vary in terms of methods and problems addressed but provide the consistent picture of therapeutic assessment as a brief approach which increases process variables related to subsequent treatment and has direct effects of symptoms reduction for a variety of psychological problems. Future directions of studies in this are finally provided.     

Pratiques d’encadrement et usages des TIC : un exemple en Gendarmerie nationale

This article will present the results of field research conducted in a French army civilian body responsible for the safety of property and people. The object of study concerns “e-leadership” management practice in connection with the information technology and communication (ICT). After recalling the role played by ICT in situations of current work, the issue of management relationship will be developed, as well as knowledge on the “e-leadership”. The results show the impact of ICT on the management relationship is rooted in a multiple determinism related to the nature of tasks, the characteristics of technological tools and constraints in the use situations.     

L’insertion professionnelle des travailleurs handicapés en France : principes et réalités

The principle underlying positive discrimination – or “affirmative action” as the phrase went in the US, essentially targeting “racial” discrimination – consists in giving more to those who have less, and defines how we understand the ways handicapped persons can get a job. This translates into policies which, despite being updated many times since their first implementation between the two world wars, have remained true to their initial, protective purpose. Over those past decades, their target groups have grown more and more diverse, but identifying them has always been the work of social and medical organisations where the State and local communities are uniting forces. Simultaneously, the professional insertion of the physically or mentally challenged has been made possible through three actions. One was to clearly define the protected segment of the most handicapped to prevent any doubt on status, while allowing the segment to grow. Another was to multiply placement organisations, such as the Cap-Emploi network, dedicated to rationalizing their own procedures for better performance while improving how they can help the handicapped to better access the ordinary job market. Yet another was to implement innovative instruments such as the AGEPFIPH. Finally we will insist on how employers are reluctant to hire individuals with limited employability. In other words this article proposes to evaluate collective objectives, notably public policies as perceived through the threefold aspect of identification-insertion-reception of the handicapped. Exploring the factors of the all-too-frequent low employment rate of handicapped workers, this article demonstrates how the policy instruments, despite their increasing number, fail to address their own negative impacts, such as the segmentation and substitution of targeted groups. It therefore questions the various logical distortions assumed by the instruments available when confronted with population limits and recipients’ demands. It therefore examines the issues regarding the status and collective management of this unskilled labor force in a context of critically changing working conditions in jobs that remain a very remote perspective.     

L’évaluation structurée du risque de récidive des personnes placées sous main de justice : méthodes et enjeux

Although the prevention of recidivism in France is currently undergoing numerous transformations, the evaluation of the risk of recidivism of individuals under the justice system is a major issue. The absence of structure and standardization in current evaluation procedures raises doubts regarding their validity and underlines the necessity to determine evaluation methods that are clinically and scientifically validated. The professionals and their administration would benefit largely from a range of strategies that would aid in executing the most just, transparent and coherent evaluation possible. This article will trace the evolution of the evaluation of the risk of recidivism, the principal strategies and methods, the most common risk factor families used, as well as illustrations of two typical strategies of evolution of the risk of recidivism; integrated evaluation with the LS/CMI and evaluation based on structured professional judgment guided by the HCR-20.     

Peut-on concevoir des documents électroniques plus efficaces ? L’exemple des diaporamas

While the use of video projection systems for slide shows is being increasingly frequent in many professional environments, very little work has been devoted to the optimization of this type of document. The aim of this article is to provide a review of the work that is likely to help improve the effectiveness of this type of medium, in particular for learning purposes. It will deal, among other things, with the role of illustrations, results charts, the redundancy between the oral and written modes and the type of text presentation, as well as the use of various forms of attention guidance and modes of structuring information in memory.