“My Attitude Made Me Do It”: Considering the Agency of Attitudes

In proposing a next step in loosening the restriction of action to humans, this paper explores what we call the agency of attitudes and especially the ethical and practical questions that such recognition should entail. In line with Actor-Network Theory, we suggest that attitudes, passions and emotions can be seen to have agency in a similar vein as tangible agents (e.g., technological devices, texts, machines). We illustrate this suggestion using an example of socialization towards pain experienced during sports. Finally, we propose that the awareness of attitude’s agency extends rather than reduces the ownership of choice of people, as it facilitates making “true decisions.”     

Gouvernance et éthique cliniques : deux outils complémentaires pour une meilleure coordination des soins et des traitements

“Governance”, “ethics” and “clinical” three words for a same goal: protect the human health. “Corporate governance” must be associated with the new theory of the firm, for which the theory of asymmetric information provides the foundations. Indeed problems of information represent a fundamental change in the prevailing paradigm within economics; they are central to understanding political economy. “Clinical governance”, promoted by the UK government, constitutes an overarching mechanism designed to improve clinical quality in the National Health Service. To the medical establishment, it is a means to improve the quality of medical practice through clinical guidelines. To make a significant impact on the improvement of healthcare quality, the principles of clinical governance must produce synergy by involving professionals in the modernization of the organization. To obtain excellence in heath care, collective actions and shared decision making were essential. In this context, Clinical ethics consultations could provide a structured approach to decision making that could assist heath professional to resolve conflicts or ethical problems that arise in the care of particular patients.     

A test of parafoveal‐on‐foveal effects with pairs of orthographically related words

One of the main controversies in the field of eye movements in reading concerns the question of whether the processing of two adjacent words in reading occurs in sequence, or in parallel. To distinguish between these views, the present experiment tested the presence of parafoveal‐on‐foveal effects with pairs of orthographically related words (or neighbours that differed by a single letter) in a controlled but reading‐like situation. Results revealed that fixation times on a foveal target word were shorter when the target was accompanied by an orthographically similar parafoveal word than when the parafoveal word was dissimilar. Furthermore, the size of the effect tended to vary with both the relative frequency of target and parafoveal words, and the position of the critical letter. These results were interpreted in the framework of a pure parallel processing hypothesis, where the processing of adjacent words is only limited by visual acuity, and the respective lexical properties of the foveal and parafoveal words.     

The Characters of Madness in the Talking Cure

Madness, as a character, is presented as such by Erasmus of Rotterdam in his The Praise of Folly: “It is I, Folly, who speaks.” When it appears in the middle of psychoanalysis, the usual instruments of exploration must be modified. This implies bringing into play an initial representation of events that have never been inscribed either in the life history or in the Unconscious, which may be repressed or forgotten later on. The purpose of this process is to put time in motion again. In this framework, the analogy between the action of theatre and the action of analysis leads me to describe the effects on the analyst when this somewhat unseemly character enters the scene, compelling the therapist to recognize the share he takes in its evocation.     

Social support from evaluative familiar persons – a buffer against stress? Preliminary evidence of neuroendocrine and psychological responses

ABSTRACT

Background and Objectives: Social support may have a stress-buffering effect when an individual is or could be negatively judged by others, but paradoxically may also exacerbate stress. The aim of our study was to examine these findings when social support was provided by a positive or negative evaluative audience composed of familiar and close others (teachers).

Design and Methods: 84 men were confronted with the Trier Social Stress Test for Groups through a 3 (negative, positive, no-audience) x?2 (familiar, unfamiliar) experimental design with four measurement points of cortisol levels and state anxiety. We also tested whether closeness with the committee members predicted these variables for the participants in the familiar conditions.

Results: Using both a frequentist and a Bayesian approach, familiarity and social support did not have stress-buffering effects (or merely anecdotal effects) on cortisol levels but buffered self-reported anxiety only for the participants faced with a supportive audience composed of familiar persons. Closeness with the experimenters was not a significant predictor of the stress responses.

Conclusions: Because these results are preliminary evidence, further investigations into the relations between support provider and recipient during evaluative tasks would be worthwhile to better explain opposing findings found in this growing literature.     

Lost ability to automatize task performance in old age

Can elderly adults automatize a new task? To address this question, 10 older adults each performed 10,080 training trials over 12 sessions on an easy but novel task. The psychological refractory period (PRP) procedure was then used to evaluate whether this highly practiced task, when presented as task 2 along with an unpracticed task 1, could proceed automatically. If automatic, task 2 processing should bypass the bottleneck and, therefore, not be delayed while central attention is devoted to task 1, yielding little dual-task interference. This is exactly what Maquestiaux, Laguë-Beauvais, Ruthruff, and Bherer (Memory and Cognition 36:1262-1282, 2008) previously observed for almost all younger adults, even with half the training on a more difficult task. Although extensive training reduced older adults’ reaction times to only 307 ms, a value virtually identical to that attained by Maquestiaux et al.’s (Memory and Cognition 36:1262-1282, 2008) younger adults, the highly practiced task 2 was slowed by 485 ms in the dual-task PRP procedure. Such a large slowing in older adults is striking given the easy tasks and massive amounts of practice. These findings demonstrate a qualitative change with age, in which older adults lose the ability to automatize novel tasks, which cannot be attributed merely to generalized cognitive slowing.     

REDUCING RAPID EATING IN ADULTS WITH INTELLECTUAL DISABILITIES

Rapid eating is a frequent problem among individuals with developmental disabilities that can pose a threat to health. This study sought to reduce the rate of eating behaviors in two adults diagnosed with moderate intellectual disability. Assessment of eating rate took place in the participants' group homes during lunch or dinner meals. Procedures included the use of vibrating pagers with and without verbal prompts to prompt eating and prevent rapid eating behaviors. Results demonstrate a clear reduction in rate of eating when using vibrating pagers and verbal prompts for both participants. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The factor structure of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory: an alternative view

Past studies of the factor structure of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI; Spielberger, Gorsuch, Lushene, Vagg, & Jacobs, 1983) have arrived at various solutions. However, a relatively strong consensus supports a four-factor (State Anxiety Present, State Anxiety Absent, Trait Anxiety Present, and Trait Anxiety Absent) structure of the scale resulting from the combination of item polarity dimensions and the original two factors (State and Trait Anxiety). In this article, we assessed the adequacy of an alternative factor model of STAI data, the two-construct, two-method model, in three large samples using confirmatory factor analysis. The results revealed a statistical advantage of the two-construct, two-method model over the one-factor model, the two-construct factor model, and the four-factor model. We discuss possible interpretational advantages of the two-construct, two-method model of the STAI.