Sensory and Postural input in the Occurrence of a Gender Difference in Orienting Liquid Surfaces

The Psychological Record - In the water-level task, both spatial skill and physical knowledge contribute to representing the surface of a liquid as horizontal irrespective of the container’s...     

Modesty and style in Islamic attire: Refashioning Muslim garments in a Western context

My ethnographic fieldwork conducted with female converts to Islam in France and in Quebec (Canada) shows that, for these women, being Muslim does not necessarily mean wearing clothes with ‘oriental’ designs. Rather, they are starting their own clothing companies so as to produce distinct Muslim-Western fashions that they promote through the Internet. By interpreting Islam in a context where Muslims are a minority religious group, converts construct alternative religious and social representations of Muslim identity that accord with their feminist interpretation of the Qu’ran while simultaneously incorporating the Western background within which they were socialized. In this regard, the strategies that they develop for wearing the veil and for integrating into their environment (family, workplace, etc.) make it clear that fashion, religion and politics are interacting in multiple, creative ways. In this paper, I look at how new Muslim feminist subjectivities are produced and realized through habits of dress, resulting in new representations of the body. I explore this issue by considering dress and hairstyle strategies developed by Muslim converts, in order to examine new perspectives on the place of gender in religion as it relates to particular social contexts.     

Magnitude of force perception errors during static contractions of the knee extensors in healthy young and elderly individuals

The accuracy of force perception during muscular contraction has not been studied extensively, despite its importance in rehabilitation and training. The purpose of this study was to quantify the errors made by healthy young and elderly individuals in their perceptions of force produced at the knee. Four different tasks were used to evaluate the perception of force and the effect of a sensory-motor reference and simultaneous contraction on the accuracy of perception. The absolute errors were similar between groups, with values of 11.9% to 16.3%, depending on the task. The raw perception errors were greater for high levels of force (>50% of the maximal voluntary contraction, or MVC), indicating an overestimation of the forces produced for both groups. At 70% MVC, the sensory-motor reference reduced raw perception errors, and the simultaneous contraction improved the accuracy of force production. Healthy young and elderly individuals had about the same capacity to judge the muscular force of their knee extensors. Therapists involved in the training of active?elderly?individuals should be aware that the accuracy of force perception is not perfect and that these clients have the same ability as young individuals to perceive their knee extension strength.     

Smoking reduces language lateralization: a dichotic listening study with control participants and schizophrenia patients

Schizophrenia has been associated with deficits in functional brain lateralization. According to some authors, the reduction of asymmetry could even promote this psychosis. At the same time, schizophrenia is accompanied by a high prevalence of nicotine dependency compared to any other population. This association is very interesting, because sex-dependent effects of smoking in auditory language asymmetries have been reported recently, and the verbal domain is also one major focus in cognitive deficit studies of schizophrenia. Thus, the altered laterality pattern in schizophrenia could, at least in part, result from secondary artefacts due to smoking rather than being a pure cause of the disease itself. To test this hypothesis, the present study examined auditory language lateralization in 67 schizophrenia patients and in 72 healthy controls in a phonemic and an emotional dichotic listening task. Our findings replicate previous research, in that smoking reduces language lateralization in men in phonemic dichotic listening. In addition, we show that smoking also reduces laterality in women in the emotional dichotic listening task. Thus, smoking alters phonemic and emotional language asymmetries differentially for men and women, with a stronger effect for men in the left hemisphere phonemic task, and a stronger effect for women in the right hemisphere emotional task. Together, these findings point towards an effect of smoking which is possibly independent of sex and hemisphere. Importantly, by testing equal numbers of smoking and non-smoking patients and controls, we found no schizophrenia-associated asymmetry effect. Possible neurobiological mechanisms with which smoking may alter auditory microcircuits and thereby diminish left-right differences are discussed.     

Short-term memory performances during sustained wakefulness in patients with obstructive sleep apnea-hypopnea syndrome

Both working and immediate memories were assessed every 4h by specific short-term memory tasks over sustained wakefulness in 12 patients with obstructive sleep apnea and hypopnea syndrome (OSAHS) and 10 healthy controls. Results indicated that OSAHS patients exhibited lower working memory performances than controls on both backward digit span and complex Sternberg tasks. Speed and accuracy on Sternberg tasks were affected by memory load in both groups. However, immediate memory was not impaired in OSAHS patients. Diurnal and nocturnal SaO(2) were correlated with speed and accuracy high-speed memory scanning performance on Sternberg tasks in patients. These results suggest specific working memory deficits associated with OSAHS over sustained wakefulness with a possible deficiency in the central executive responsible for the higher information processing, in addition to a potentially insufficient storage capacity. Among OSAHS patients, working memory ability involved in high-speed memory scanning may be impaired by chronic hypoxemia.     

The influence of suggestibility on memory

We provide a translation of Binet and Henri's pioneering 1894 paper on the influence of suggestibility on memory. Alfred Binet (1857-1911) is famous as the author who created the IQ test that bears his name, but he is almost unknown as the psychological investigator who generated numerous original experiments and fascinating results in the study of memory. His experiments published in 1894 manipulated suggestibility in several ways to determine effects on remembering. Three particular modes of suggestion were employed to induce false recognitions: (1) indirect suggestion by a preconceived idea; (2) direct suggestion; and (3) collective suggestion. In the commentary we suggest that Binet and Henri's (1894) paper written over 115 years ago is still highly relevant even today. In particular, Binet's legacy lives on in modern research on misinformation effects in memory, in studies of conformity, and in experiments on the social contagion of memory.     

Walking dreams in congenital and acquired paraplegia

To test if dreams contain remote or never-experienced motor skills, we collected during 6 weeks dream reports from 15 paraplegics and 15 healthy subjects. In 9/10 subjects with spinal cord injury and in 5/5 with congenital paraplegia, voluntary leg movements were reported during dream, including feelings of walking (46%), running (8.6%), dancing (8%), standing up (6.3%), bicycling (6.3%), and practicing sports (skiing, playing basketball, swimming). Paraplegia patients experienced walking dreams (38.2%) just as often as controls (28.7%). There was no correlation between the frequency of walking dreams and the duration of paraplegia. In contrast, patients were rarely paraplegic in dreams. Subjects who had never walked or stopped walking 4–64 years prior to this study still experience walking in their dreams, suggesting that a cerebral walking program, either genetic or more probably developed via mirror neurons (activated when observing others performing an action) is reactivated during sleep.     

Composer avec la diversité culturelle en classe de maternelle: résultats d’une analyse de récits de pratique enseignante

This article offers an analysis of teachers’ narrative within which kindergarten teachers have rebuilt their intercultural experience in the classroom, through a situation featuring a child "from another culture". The progressive scheduling in, oriented towards the ideal type of commitment to the child "of another culture", which led the analysis, will be presented and interpreted from two angles, therefore providing a definition of what we named the "otherness in act ", referring to some "enactment" of the paradigm of otherness (Abdallah Pretceille, 1996, 1999, 2003).