Psychologie du frisson esthétique

This study concerns the problem of aesthetic emotions and that of aesthetic chills in particular. We asked thirty subjects to describe a narrative structure (film, play, book) eliciting chills and the phenomenology of the aesthetic experience. A number of non-random redundancies are observable. The stimuli eliciting positive aesthetic chills in our population have a sensorial dimension and their particular properties are often the selfless actions, existential considerations of a very general nature (e.g., the meaning of life), moments of inner recollection or quiet reflection, situations of solidarity and communion (family, couple, friends) or, on the contrary, situations of violent separation (family, couple, friends). In general, when real events are at stake (and not fictional scenes as in a film or a novel), subjects describe situations where they are safe, where they trust the environment.     

Les vicissitudes du préjudice d’agrément

The fate of the loss of amenity has always been related to the right of recourse of the third-party payers against the person in charge of the damage. The loss of amenity has been recognized by Law of the 27 December 1973. It was at that time that it was excluded from the recourse of the third-party payers. It was not the case of the physiological injuries which had always been submitted to the recourse of the third-party payers. At first, these injuries had included the disorders in the conditions of existence. But in 2005, the Dintilhac nomenclature adopted a restrictive conception of the loss of amenity. This damage is now defined as the impossibility to practice regularly a specific activity of sport or leisure. In addition, the Law of 21 December 2006 imposed on third-party payers to exercise their action only on pecuniary damage. The physiological injuries were therefore excluded from this action. The strict definition of loss of amenity is both adopted in Civil Law and Social law. But in these two areas, the analysis of the judicial practice reveals that it is undermined the right for the full repair of the victims under their loss of amenity. Accordingly, the question of the opportunity to widen once more the definition of the loss of amenity arises today.     

Effets du bilinguisme précoce sur la flexibilité représentationnelle et procédurale dans le dessin du bonhomme

The present research aims to evaluate representational and procedural flexibility by comparing the performances of simultaneous bilingual children French-Arabic (n = 28), successive bilingual children Tamil-French (n = 21) and French monolinguals (n = 24) at 5 years old and at 8 years old educated, in public school, in a disadvantaged neighborhood. The paradigm of the man that does not exist (Karmiloff-Smith, 1990) has been proposed to measure the ability to introduce graphic innovation into a familiar production and drawing a man by starting with the foot (Baldy, 2010) was used to evaluate the ability to make an usual pattern in an unusual way. The results show that bilingual children as young as 5 years old produce significantly more inter-categorical innovations than their monolingual peers while in monolingual children this capacity doesn’t appear until 8 years old. In procedural representations, the results are more nuanced. The underlying mechanisms that explain the best performance of bilingual children are discussed.     

L’indépendance du médecin à nouveau proclamée

In the must-known “Vincent Lambert case”, many jurisdictions have had to adjudicate on what was submitted to them. The latest decision from Châlons-en-Champagne's administrative court almost went unnoticed. However, the judgment turns out to be truly significant. It reminds that the principles of medical doctor's independence and freedom of action are simply fundamentals and unavoidable. The patient management practitioner shall not be regarded as a mere executor of an earlier decision taken by a medical colleague.