Phases in Movement After-Effects and their relationship to the kinetic figural effect

Summary A Movement After-Effect (MAE) observed on a structured test figure contains generally two successive phases. The initial one is non-contingent upon the test figure and is assumed to result from an adaptation process. The second phase is shown to be contingent upon the features of the test figure and their similarity with those of the generating figure. A conditioning process is assumed to share in its appearance. In Experiment I, it is shown that the areal spread of MAE which may appear in the contingent phase is likely to result from a generalization process in which part of the test figure corresponding to an unstimulated area becomes transiently effective in generating a MAE. In Experiment II distributed practice of the MAE is shown to lead to an increase in the duration of the effect when the generating and test figures are similar. This last result suggests that the true conditioning stimulus is the generating figure as such.     

Objet et methode de la science juridique

Sans résumé     

Sur la tête de Gorgias. Le “parler beau” et le “dire vrai” dans Le Banquet de Platon

Rhetoric is at present the object of a rehabilitation on a grand scale, all the more as it overlaps the fields of literature, linguistics, and philosophy. Actually, if philosophy rejects and removes rhetoric, it is nevertheless, as a method of word, wholly impregnated with it. To investigate the complex relationship of mutual implication in which rhetoric and philosophy are involved is part and parcel of this plan of re-evaluation of rhetoric as “discourse art” with a view to a re-definition of its field and functions. In this perspective, rhetoric articulates itself within, in relation to, and with Plato's dialogues in a much more subtle and complex manner than warranted by the process of “anti-rhetoricalness” initiated by philosophy against rhetoric after Plato. Going back to the origins of this conflict and recalling the system of oppositions supporting the official Platonic vulgate, this study begins to pave the way for a micr-reading of the Platonic text regarded as a paradigm of philosophic textuality. It is certainly true that the Phaedrus, the Gorgias, and the Symposium set up a system of oppositions between between rhetoric and dialectrics which are in contrast with each other in the word practices, in the rules and methods of discourse, and which are antinomic in their ends. This system of oppositions always seems to be referable to the opposition between “speaking fair” and “speaking the truth”. But the strategies and procedures set going in the Symposium, in particular in “Agathon's speech” and in “Diotima and Socrates' speech” betray a much closer connection between the supposed “bad rhetoric” revealed by Phaedrus and the “good rhetoric” which is dialectrics. The search for this connection is conducted through two types of reading of the Symposium. In actual fact, between the paronomasia on the agathoi and that on “Gorgias' head” (this Gorgon of rhetoric) there takes place a speech, Agathon's, whose parodied, exacerbated, and counterfeit rhetoric allows us to gauge Plato's own rhetoric in this artefact which distances itself, more or less openly, from Gorgian rhetoric. This “hyper-rhetoricalness” and “over-grammaticalness” cannot be there with the sole aim of serving as evidence against rhetoric. It is in fact possible to perceive through the web of the text the ends, quite rhetorical themselves, which preside over the structure of Agathon's speech, seen from the viewpoint of the figure of the antithesis. Thus, it is in the play of a “neo-rhetoricalness” where we must, in the last analysis, look for the spring allowing the philosophical discourse to overturn the rhetorical one. And while in Giorgias what clothes the discourse is actually the truth, in Plato it is the antinomy between “speaking fair” and “speaking the truth”, conveniently set up, which forms the basis of the function of diversion by which Socrates points out — in the complex network of the continuity and discontinuity existing between rhetoric and philosophy — the structures of reversal and the original upheavals which Plato imposes on the relation between rhetorical and dialectric discourse. Actually, dialectrics is found in “Socrates and Diotima's speech”, not as “anti-rhetoric”, but rather as a “transposition” of the rhetorical discourse, thus acquiring the traits of a “neo-rhetoric”. The analysis of this discourse, which constitutes the second reading exercise of the Symposium, allows us to pick out the aversion and inversion strategies that turn dialectrics in an overtuned rhetoric. The founding deed of this “inversion” (rather than “separation”) is recognizable in the alteration it introduces in the first plase in the type of discourse, which from a rhetorical, explicitly addressed, macrological, monological, and continuous discourse turns into a dialectical, brachylogous, dialogic discourse with partners and interlocutors, i.e. into a dialogue; in the second place, the subject of the discourse shifts from the locuteur, author and signer of the discourse to ever-present interlocutors who end up by making room for a talking and knowing speaker in a regime of anonymous subjectivity: this is an extreme alteration of the anthropological and epistemic subject, culminating in the scientific discourse of Euclidean geometry. Finally, the inversion is recognizable in the object of the discourse, whose prâgma slips from being the predicate of a qualified grammatical subject into a process of objectivation and substantivation, thereby moving from the rhetorical question “What is beautiful?” to the philosophical question “What is the beautiful?”. The hypothesis of a “neo-rhetoricalness” of dialectics, underlying this research, is therefore more Platonic than it appears, insofar as between rhetoric and dialectics there has been a tradition which has tried to wipe out the traces of its transmission, but where the neo-rhetoricalness of dialectics shows through quite clearly, taking advantage, without admitting it, from a more ancient rhetoric than it is itself. (A.T.)     

La question ontologique et laPhénoménologie de la perception

Sans résuméNous remercions le professeur Gary Brent Madison de l'Université McMaster ainsi que le professeur Théodore Geraets de l'Université d'Ottawa qui ont lu et commenté des versions antérieures de cet article. Nous voulons remercier en particulier la professeure Gisèle Chevalier du Département d'études franÇaises de l'Université de Moncton pour ses précieux conseils sur le fond et la forme du texte. Les erreurs et les omissions demeurent toutefois les nÔtres.     

Gender Differences in Parental Influences on Adolescent Body Dissatisfaction and Disordered Eating

This study explored gender differences in the relationship between parental influences and body dissatisfaction and disordered eating among offspring. Participants were 221 male and 380 (63%) female French high school students of mean age 16 (SD?=?.95) years old, from the Toulouse area, who completed a survey exploring parental influences, body dissatisfaction, drive for thinness and bulimic symptoms. Girls (compared to boys) perceived more maternal comments regarding both their own weight and shape, and the importance of physical appearance. Parental variables explained a larger amount of the variance in girls’ body dissatisfaction and disordered eating (compared to boys’). Findings support both a cumulative model and a gender-linked model of transmission of attitudes and behaviors related to shape and eating.     

Contributions of psychopathic, narcissistic, Machiavellian, and sadistic personality traits to juvenile delinquency

The aim of this study was to assess the relative contributions of psychopathic, narcissistic, Machiavellian, and sadistic traits to delinquent behaviors in adolescents. Participants were 615 high-school students who completed self-report questionnaires. Psychopathic, narcissistic, Machiavellian, and sadistic traits were moderately correlated suggesting they may be overlapping but distinct constructs. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses were conducted to control for other socio-familial or psychopathological risk factors. Psychopathic and sadistic traits were independent predictors of delinquent behaviors in boys only. These findings suggest the importance of studying the role of sadistic traits in juvenile delinquency.     

Predictive influence of phonological processing, morphological/syntactic skill, and naming speed on spelling performance

This paper focuses on the predictive influence of phonological awareness, morphological/syntactic skill, and naming speed on spelling. The retrospective study correlated spelling performance in a group of 199 French-speaking children at the end of grade 2 with earlier capacities for phonemic manipulation, morphological/syntactic correction, and naming speed, assessed at the end of grade 1. The results are consistent with an integrative model that challenges the unitary phonological disorder hypothesis and confirmed that in French, as in other languages, naming speed is an independent predictor of reading performance.     

Factor analyses of the DIB-R in adolescents

The goal of this study was to examine the factor structure of the Revised Diagnostic Interview for Borderlines (DIB-R; Zanarini, Gunderson, Franckenburg, & Chauncey, 1989) in a nonpatient sample of 118 adolescents. A principal components factor analysis with a Varimax rotation extracted three factors. A confirmatory factor analysis showed that this three-factor model provided an adequate fit. The first factor, which included depression, anxiety, helplessness/hopelessness, loneliness/emptiness, and also encompassed odd thinking/unusual perceptive experiences and quasi-psychotic experiences, appeared to be centered on painful feelings and dissociative defense. The second factor, labeled "impulsivity," consisted of impulse action patterns, counterdependency, and stormy relationships. This factor seemed to be centered on defensive acting-out. The third factor, called "aggressiveness," consisted of anger, hypomania, devaluation/manipulation/sadism, and demand/entitlement, and might express manic/narcissistic defenses. These analyses suggest that there may be homogeneous components of borderline symptomatology in adolescents that may reflect affective disturbances and defensive mechanisms.     

Moral psychiatry: Justice in the modern world,in Hebraic civilization and in psychiatric practice,Part 1

Abstract

The question is raised whether justice is possible. Attitudes to justice are described, and examples of justice and injustice in French psychiatric practice before and during World War II are presented and discussed.