L’hospitalisation sans consentement des malades mentaux décidément sous l’œil du Conseil constitutionnel (Commentaire de la décision no 2012-235 QPC du 20 avril 2012)

Following a referral by a patient organization, the Constitutional Council gave on 20th April 2012 a decision on the law without consent of hospitalizations for mental patients. Four sections of the Act were examined. This results in one hand that ambulatory care is now supervised by a plan of care (POC) is constitutional. However, sections that provided a more rigorous regime for certain categories of patients deemed more dangerous than others are too vague. Lawmakers need to reform this part of the law before 1st October 2013.     

Creative Activity,Personality, Mental Illness,and Short‐Term Mating Success

It has been argued that creativity evolved, at least in part, through sexual selection to attract mates. Recent research lends support to this view and has also demonstrated a link between certain dimensions of schizotypy, creativity, and short‐term mating. The current study delves deeper into these relationships by focusing on engagement in creative activity and employing an expansive set of personality and mental health measures (Five Factor Model, schizotypy, anxiety, and depression). A general tendency to engage in everyday forms of creative activity was related to number of sexual partners within the past year in males only. Furthermore, schizotypy, anxiety, and Neuroticism were all indirectly related to short‐term mating success, again for males only. The study provides additional support for predictions made by sexual selection theory that men have a higher drive for creative display, and that creativity is linked with higher short‐term mating success. The study also provides support for the contention that certain forms of mental illness may still exist in the gene pool because particular personality traits associated with milder forms of mental illness (i.e., Neuroticism & schizotypy) are also associated directly with creativity and indirectly with short‐term mating success.     

Online recognition of music is influenced by relative and absolute pitch information

Three experiments explored online recognition in a nonspeech domain, using a novel experimental paradigm. Adults learned to associate abstract shapes with particular melodies, and at test they identified a played melody's associated shape. To implicitly measure recognition, visual fixations to the associated shape versus a distractor shape were measured as the melody played. Degree of similarity between associated melodies was varied to assess what types of pitch information adults use in recognition. Fixation and error data suggest that adults naturally recognize music, like language, incrementally, computing matches to representations before melody offset, despite the fact that music, unlike language, provides no pressure to execute recognition rapidly. Further, adults use both absolute and relative pitch information in recognition. The implicit nature of the dependent measure should permit use with a range of populations to evaluate postulated developmental and evolutionary changes in pitch encoding.     

We're all in this together now: group performance feedback to increase classroom team data collection

This study's primary goal was to evaluate the use of performance feedback procedures delivered to a classroom team to increase daily data collection. Performance feedback (PFB) was delivered to four classroom teams responsible for the daily collection of data representing student performance during prescribed instructional activities. Using a multiple-baseline design, the effects of the team performance-feedback were evaluated for the target student, and for generalization to data collection for all classroom students. A secondary question evaluated if student on-task behavior correlated with increased data collection. Finally, social validity was investigated to evaluate team satisfaction with the PFB intervention. The results demonstrate improved data collection across all four classroom teams for the target student in each classroom and generalization within classrooms to all remaining students. Slight increases in student on-task behavior were observed in three of the four classrooms, and teacher satisfaction ratings were high.     

Acquisition of a visual discrimination and reversal learning task by Labrador retrievers

Optimal cognitive ability is likely important for military working dogs (MWD) trained to detect explosives. An assessment of a dog’s ability to rapidly learn discriminations might be useful in the MWD selection process. In this study, visual discrimination and reversal tasks were used to assess cognitive performance in Labrador retrievers selected for an explosives detection program using a modified version of the Toronto General Testing Apparatus (TGTA), a system developed for assessing performance in a battery of neuropsychological tests in canines. The results of the current study revealed that, as previously found with beagles tested using the TGTA, Labrador retrievers (N = 16) readily acquired both tasks and learned the discrimination task significantly faster than the reversal task. The present study confirmed that the modified TGTA system is suitable for cognitive evaluations in Labrador retriever MWDs and can be used to further explore effects of sex, phenotype, age, and other factors in relation to canine cognition and learning, and may provide an additional screening tool for MWD selection.     

What Do We Do With This Jesus? A Reading of Matthew 15:21–28 through the Lens of Psychoanalytic Theory

This paper interprets the story of the Canaanite woman in Matthew 15 using the lens of psychoanalytic theory—Winnicott’s concept of True Self and Stolorow/Atwood’s model of intersubjectivity—arguing that, for modern readers, the Canaanite woman and Jesus suggest new possibilities for being human. This full humanity results from both of them moving from False Self to True Self and from the mutuality that characterizes their interaction. This reader-response interpretation leads to new understandings of: (1) loving self—seeing ourselves as empowered, refusing compliance as a response to oppression; (2) loving other—overturning the self/other paradigm to regard all individuals in terms of their humanity; and (3) loving God—learning to be in mutual and authentic relationship with God.     

Determinable Properties and Overdetermination of Causal Powers

Do determinable properties such as colour, mass, and height exist in addition to their corresponding determinates, being red, having a mass of 1 kilogram, and having a height of 2 metres? Optimists say yes, pessimists say no. Among the latter are Carl Gillett and Bradley Rives who argue that optimism leads to systematic overdetermination of causal powers and hence should be rejected on the grounds that the position is ontologically unparsimonious. In this paper I defend optimism against this charge by showing that overdetermination of causal powers cannot plausibly be avoided when grounding what I call joint powers. It is therefore not clear why the optimist should be worried about the overdetermination of causal powers that follows from positing determinable properties.     

Confabulating reasons for behaving bad: The psychological consequences of unconsciously activated behaviour that violates one's standards

Numerous studies have been conducted to demonstrate that behaviours are frequently activated unconsciously. The present studies investigate the downstream psychological consequences of such unconscious behaviour activation, building on work on the explanatory vacuum and post‐priming misattribution. It was hypothesized that unconsciously activated behaviours trigger a negative affective response if the behaviour violates a personal standard and that this negative affect subsequently motivates people to confabulate a reason for the behaviour. Results provided evidence for this mediated moderation model. Study 1 showed that participants who were primed to act less prosocially indeed reported increased levels of negative affect and, as a result, were inclined to confabulate a reason for their behaviour. Study 2 replicated these findings in the domain of eating and provided evidence for the moderating role of personal standards as well as the entire mediated moderation model. These findings have relevant theoretical implications as they add to the modest number of studies that demonstrate that the effect of unconscious priming may extend well beyond performing the primed behaviour itself to influence subsequent affect and attribution processes. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.