Incertitudes au cours de la carrière et construction des perspectives temporelles

The increasing uncertainty context, in which individuals' professional paths are taking form today, is the occasion to a critical renewal of career course analysis models. In the first part of the article, we argue with the model propounded by Power and Rothausen (2003), which aims to analyse and support mid-career professional orientation behaviours, by extending the Super's career maintenance stage. We partly break free with them, defending the conception of an active socialisation, which analysis of orientation behaviours is based on the conjoined study of temporal perspectives and of exchanges between life domains. This point of view is supported by results from a research dealing with future temporal perspectives reconstruction processes of individuals confronted with the unemployment uncertainty. They show that individuals do not project in the future only by striving for yielding “employable”. Their projects do not only result from the rational control of the information related to the anticipated professional environment. Ascribed to peculiar paths, those projects summon up processes of values confrontation and comparisons with others, in the plurality of individuals' life fields.     

不同背景噪音干扰下的数字短时记忆研究

以三种类型(交通噪音、生活噪音、舒缓乐音)三种声级(40.7dBA、56.4dBA、73.3dBA)的环境噪音作为无关声音刺激,考察其对数字短时记忆广度和Sternberg任务的影响,发现:(1)背景噪音的不同对个体数字短时记忆广度影响没有显著差异;(2)背景噪音声级的不同对个体删除极端数值后正确反应的反应时及对“极错总比率”都有显著的影响;(3)对于删除极端数值后的正确反应来说,在不同背景噪音存在下,随着记忆集的增大,反应时仍然呈直线上升趋势。     

Hypertonic saline mimics the effects of vasopressin on inhibitory avoidance in the rat

Rats tested in a step-through inhibitory avoidance task were administered hypertonic saline (2 ml of 0.25. 0.5, and 1.0 M intraperitoneally) or arginine vasopressin (1.0, 2.0, and 4.0 micrograms) injected subcutaneously (sc) after the training trial where the rats received a mild footshock (0.2 mA, 3 s). Both hypertonic saline and vasopressin produced significant increases in latency to reenter 24 h later. These treatments failed to increase reentry latencies in animals that received the same procedure but no shock. The facilitation of inhibitory avoidance produced by hypertonic saline was reversed by sc administration of 25 micrograms of the vasopressor (V-1) vasopressin antagonist, dPtyr(Me)AVP. The results suggest that the endogenous release of vasopressin can be behaviorally significant in situations of acute homeostatic challenge.     

Study-time of sentences as a function of their specificity and of semantic exploration

In self-paced learning conditions the study-time of sentences is supposed to depend jointly upon the information content of the material and upon its exploration by the subject in the course of learning. In exp. 1 informative content was varied by using sentences constituted either of general or of specific words; study-time was found to be significantly longer for the latter sentences than for the former and the recall performance to be equal. Differential semantic exploration and storage were instigated by presenting in the series either pairs of similar, and thereby contrasted sentences, or isolated sentences. In exp. 2, study-time of the sentences was longer than that of the latter; but the first recall performance recorded with the constrasted sentences was also higher. The divergent effects of the nature of the material and of the activity of the subject upon study-time and recall performance were emphasized.     

Measurements of the behavioral effects of albino mutation in mice (Mus musculus): comparisons of coisogenic inbred and hybrid lines

The effects of the albino gene on mouse behavior were examined, in particular its possible interactions with nonallelic genes (epistasis). More generally, the possible effects of genetic background (inbreeding depression or hybrid vigor) on the effects of the mutation were also considered. Tasks requiring either predominantly motor or predominantly cognitive capacity were studied for coisogenic albino and pigmented mice from either an inbred strain (C57BL/6 c/c vs. C57BL/6 +/c) or an F1 heterozygous generation (F1 c/c vs. F1 +/c) from a BALB/c X C57BL/6 +/c cross. The results showed a clear albino gene effect in the two lines and provide further evidence that the gene is the effective factor. On the other hand, there was no significant interaction between the mutation and the genotypic group (C57BL/6 or F1), which indicates that the effects of the mutation act approximately in an additive fashion between loci in these groups.     

The Course of Representation in Memory During the Comprehension of Paragraphs

The course of the representation built in memory from a text during comprehension of paragraphs was studied by a probe technique (immediate item recognition). Three experiments showed that response times, the main variable, gradually increase as a function of the lag between the probe (a word or an atomic proposition) and its target in the text. In Experiment 3 the same result was also found with a priming technique. The absence of any kick-up over the course of time was confirmed by several additional analyses of individual data. The results were only weakly consistent with models assuming two distinct memory stores, in particular a specific “short-term memory store,” but highly consistent with models involving semantic activation and subsequent gradual deactivation.     

Cross-cognitive Aspects of Discourse Comprehension: Semantic Post-representation

Four related sciences, cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics and neurobiology, are compared in a cross-cognitive way with respect to their approaches in the study of discourse comprehension, in particular its final product, semantic post-representations. The nature and structure of these, as they are built in a human mind after processing a short piece of discourse (one or a few sentences), seem to be best described in the framework of activation models, a family in which the basic processes of comprehension are considered to be activation of semantic units from long-term memory, predication and construction of higher-level propositional constituents. The notion of “activation level”, applied to such representational units in working memory, is particularly fruitful in this framework. Besides, a satisfying neural interpretation of this psychological type of model can be proposed. The paper shortly presents a series of experiments, involving a semantic probing technique and three main categories of factors, with results that support the semantic post-representation view, in addition to others. A critical comparison of this analysis with neurofunctional imagery data confirms the necessity of cross-cognitive exchanges.     

The hyperventilation provocation test in panic disorder.

Forty-eight patients with DSM-III-R Panic Disorder underwent a hyperventilation provocation Test (HVPT). Twenty-four patients rated the symptoms induced during the HVPT as similar to those occurring during panic attacks in daily life. Contrary to the classical hyperventilation model of panic, no differences were found in respiratory physiology between recognizers and non-recognizers before and during voluntary hyperventilation. Moreover, recognizers and non-recognizers reported comparable levels of panic and hyperventilation symptoms and state anxiety during panic attacks in daily life. Ten of the recognizers also had a panic attack during the HVPT, independent of any differential CO2 alterations. Compared to non-panickers, panickers obtained higher scores for agoraphobia and depression. On the basis of these results, it is concluded that recognizers or panickers do not show a tendency towards hyperventilation, but that reports of severe panic and hyperventilation symptoms are more closely related to the level of anxiety. These results are more consistent with the cognitive model of panic, which emphasizes the patient's tendency to interpret somatic symptoms catastrophically.