Des conduites à risques aux assuétudes comportementales : le trouble addictif au danger

Several studies show that playing a dangerous sport has a direct influence on the emotional state of athletes. Engaging in such behaviour would not only reduce negative affect but also produce a positive affect that does not equate only relief but an “extraordinary experienced”. Notwithstanding the unique qualities of these sports, it is likely that some subclinical individual characteristics such as sensation seeking, emotional–behavioural deregulation can promote a self-reinforcement of these practices or even facilitated the installation of an addictive tendency. Risk and intense sensation are also at the heart of dangerous games. Four points seem to motivate these practices: risk-taking, intensity, loss of consciousness, and the “wake survival”. In addition, practitioners are characterized by a more severe depressive symptomatology than non-practitioners. Some of these depressive elements are probably anterior to the game, but it is also possible that others are the consequence; this has the effect of strengthening the emotional–behavioural addiction. Through these extreme sports and games of non-oxygenation, the level of danger appears to be a real source of excitement. Playing with death is going to give inner magnitude to the experience. Without the sense of risk, the practice of the activity would not make sense. Psychological functioning of these sports and these “players” is based on the need to be stimulated, to be excited by the risk or even the fear in order to be appeased. Also, treat the danger, but also and mainly deal with emotions. The danger as a means of activation may fill in a toxic function of emotional and behavioural self-regulation including a risk that this excitation will self-sustained. Indeed, some of these athletes and these “players” increase their practice and push the safety threshold by adopting behaviours more and more risky in order to experiment higher sensations. When some semiological clues characterize the practice of risky activities like the repetition of a dangerous situation, loss of control, the invasion of the psychic life, time spent at the expense of social, family and school activities… they may reflect a real addiction to danger. It therefore becomes necessary for the clinician and the researcher to identify all these prodromal symptoms and signs of addiction. Criteria for the diagnosis of Addictive Disorder to Danger are proposed and discussed.     

Les troubles des comportements alimentaires chez des étudiants de première année : une étude prospective multigroupes

There is increasing use of the phrase “campus eating symptoms” to describe regular binge eating (together with frequent exercise, and occasional reliance on vomiting or laxatives), concerns about body image, depressive symptoms, stress, and university adjustment problems among students. Incidence of eating disorders in the early grades of university is increasing, and the period from age 17–19 years (peak of bulimia) which corresponds to the beginning of study at university is critical. Given the stressful environment that is the 1st academic year, it is useful to consider eating disorders risk factors.

Method

Our study is longitudinal. At the beginning, the participants consisted of 1110 freshmen. Data regarding adjustment to university, gender, body image, BMI, transactional variables (perceived stress and coping) and eating disorders (EAT-26) were collected. At T2 (end of academic year), 556 students were recruited to reassess their eating behaviours. The aim of the study was to test gender invariance of a theoretical eating disorders model including all these variables and eating disorders measured a year apart from a mixed population integrating the university for the first times. This model assumes that these variables exert direct effects on eating disorders as measured in time one who in turn will affect the stability of these troubles a year later. Although very little research include boys in the study of eating disorders, the results of our multi-group analysis support the idea of the existence of sex differences in eating disorder predictors: the only common predictor of eating disorders among girls and boys was the use emotion-focused coping. Among boys, the best predictors of eating disorders were problem-focused coping, and seeking social support. Among girls, our results revealed that body mass index, body image, and academic adjustment and stress were the predictors of eating disorders. Finally, we found a temporal stability of eating disorders. This study showed that personal and contextual aspects have a direct impact on students’ eating behaviour. However, among boys, neither body image nor perceived stress affect the eating behaviour but how they cope with stress. The gender gap in the explanation of eating disorders suggest to not exclude the male population in this type of study and to treat the data separately.     

Advancing a Community Psychology of Men

This commentary reviews and integrates several themes described in this special issue on men. Social forces of the past and present such as colonialism and hegemonic masculinity are noted as a continuing influence on men’s social roles, as are the social-justice movements that contribute to the liberation of women and sexual minorities. The early sections of the commentary examine the studies in the context of these forces and movements, emphasizing how men both resist and accept traditional masculinities. In the latter sections the commentary turns to the research process –first with a discussion of the structural and constructionist themes in the studies, followed by the issue of how men are classified (implicitly or otherwise) as either agents or targets of oppression. The implications of these for community psychology research with men are considered, along with the idea that research is a social “performance” in which a researcher’s concern about her or his audience influence the research process. The conclusion summarizes the challenges of conducting research with men while making the case that community psychology offers some distinct advantages in managing them. Of particular value is the field’s emphasis on diversity, social justice, and social ecology.     

Kant's One World: Interpreting 'Transcendental Idealism'

The relationship between divine and created causality was widely discussed in medieval and early modern philosophy. Contemporary scholars of these discussions typically stake out three possible positions: occasionalism, concurrentism, and mere-conservationism. It is regularly claimed that virtually no medieval thinker adopted the final view which denies that God is an immediate active cause of creaturely actions. The main aim of this paper is to further understanding of the medieval causality debate, and particularly the mere-conservationist position, by analysing Peter John Olivi's neglected defence of it. The paper also includes discussion of Thomas Aquinas's arguments for concurrentism and an analysis of whether Olivi's objections refute his position.     

Memories defining the self in Alzheimer’s disease

ABSTRACT

There is a debate over the extent to which personal identity or the self is preserved in patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Autobiographical memory deficits at early stages of AD could contribute to altering patients’ self. However, the nature of the relationship between autobiographical memory deficits and the self in AD has not been much investigated experimentally. In the present study, we aimed to investigate the integrative meaning of self-defining memories (SDMs) in early stages of AD and to analyse its relationship with the self-concept. The results showed that, when compared to the control group, AD patients less frequently extracted meaning from their SDMs and the meaning was less frequently tied to the self. Patients exhibited some altered aspects of the self-concept (i.e., complexity and strength), though some other components still persisted (i.e., valence and certainty). Correlation analyses showed that the impaired integrative meaning in the AD group was correlated with some changes in self-concept. We suggest that integrative meaning may act as a bridge between autobiographical memories and the self-concept, with reduced integration abilities appearing as a potential mechanism for the deterioration of the self-concept in AD.     

No dual-task practice effect in Alzheimer's disease

Diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) requires evidence of progressive decline in cognitive function. However, many tests used to assess cognitive function suffer from considerable practice effects, reducing their reliability. Several studies have reported that the ability to do two things at once, or dual tasking, is impaired in AD, but unaffected by healthy ageing. The apparent specificity of this impairment suggests that this assessment may be particularly useful in the early diagnosis of AD, but the reliability of this assessment remains unknown. Therefore, this study investigated simultaneous performance of digit recall and tracking tasks across six testing sessions in eight people with AD, eight healthy older adults and eight healthy younger adults. The results found that dual-task performance was unaffected by healthy ageing, but significantly impaired in AD, with no effect of repeated exposure. The absence of any improvements in performance despite increased familiarity with the task's demands suggests that not only is the dual-task assessment well suited for monitoring progression over time, but also that dual tasking involves a specific cognitive function which is impaired in the AD brain.     

Avoiding Authoritarianism: On the Problem of Justification in Contemporary Critical Social Theory

Abstract

Critical social theories look critically at the ways in which particular social arrangements hinder human flourishing, with a view to bringing about social change for the better. In this they are guided by the idea of a good society in which the identified social impediments to human flourishing would once and for all have been removed. The question of how these guiding ideas of the good life can be justified as valid across socio‐cultural contexts and historical epochs is the most fundamental difficulty facing critical social theories today. This problem of justification, which can be traced back to certain key shifts in the modern Western social imaginary, calls on contemporary theories to negotiate the tensions between the idea of context‐transcendent validity and their own anti‐authoritarian impulses. Habermas makes an important contribution towards resolving the problem, but takes a number of wrong turnings.     

阿尔茨海默病生物学标志物研究进展

阿尔茨海默病（AD）是常见的中枢神经系统变性疾病,是痴呆最常见的病因,发病率高.病理特征为老年斑及神经元纤维缠结.AD的确诊有赖病理学,临床诊断极其耗时.由于尚无准确的早期诊断方法,常使AD患者错过早期治疗的时机,这成为制约有效防控AD的瓶颈问题.因此寻找高敏感性、特异性、无创性的生物学标志物对AD的早期诊断至关重要.本文仅将目前较为广泛研究的生物学标志物及其研究现状作一概述.分别对脑脊液、血液、尿液及唾液中的AD标志物作逐一介绍.     

The Medieval Commentary Tradition:

No abstract available for this article.     

Subjective states associated with retrieval failures in Parkinson’s disease

Instances in which we cannot retrieve information immediately but know that the information might be retrieved later are subjective states that accompany retrieval failure. These are expressed in feeling-of-knowing (FOK) and Tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) experiences. In Experiment 1, participants with Parkinson’s disease (PD) and older adult controls were given general questions and asked to report when they experienced a TOT state and to give related information about the missing word. The PD group experienced similar levels of TOTs but provided less correct peripheral information related to the target when in a TOT state. In Experiment 2, participants were given a Semantic (general knowledge questions) and an Episodic (word pairs) FOK task. PD patients failed to accurately predict their future memory performance (FOK) in response to both episodic and semantic cues. Results are interpreted in the context of recent frameworks of memory and metacognition.