Remarks about the Nietzschean dancing God

Nietzsche and (or beyond) Christianity: a worn-out and almost banal problem? In this article I argue that this topic goes far beyond a mere opposition between Christians and Nietzscheans. I want to show that the actual issue concerns Nietzsche's attempt to overcome the moral hegemony within Christianity. In this context, Nietzsche's project is not to eradicate religion but to define a new religious space. I have organised this discussion by conceiving the present article around a sentence extracted from Thus spoke Zarathustra. I first analyse the text in its syntactic and rhetorical composition. Nietzsche's very strategy (or trick?) resides in undermining the Christian discourse from the inside: he argues that Christian morality is not inspired by a cheerful affirmation of life but by its vindictive negation. I further show that Nietzsche puts at stake the Christian striving for a justification of life and consequently its incapacity of accepting the question-mark of existence. Within his radical critique, Nietzsche points to an authentic attitude towards life, an attitude which I have designated with the metaphor of the dancing God.     

Hope as a Predictor of Interpersonal Suicide Risk

The current study hypothesized that (1) hope would negatively predict burdensomeness, thwarted belongingness, and acquired capability to enact lethal injury; (2) hope would negatively predict suicidal ideation; and (3) the interpersonal suicide risk factors would predict suicidal ideation. Results indicated that hope negatively predicted burdensomeness and thwarted belongingness, but positively predicted acquired capability to enact suicide. Contrary to our second hypothesis, hope did not predict suicidal ideation, but interpersonal risk factors for suicide predicted suicidal ideation. Results are discussed in terms of implications for hope theory and Joiner's (2005) interpersonal risk factors for suicide, and for clinical practice.     

The effects of narrative context on French verbal inflections: A developmental perspective

This experiment examines how narrative context affects French subjects' selection of past imperfective (imparfait) vs. perfective inflections with different predicate types. Adults and 10-year-old children were asked to inflect verbs presented in their written infinitive form in two conditions: (a) in isolated sentences; (b) embedded in the beginning, middle, or end of narratives. Regardless of conditions, the adults rarely used theimparfait with punctual resultative predicates. In both conditions, the frequency ofimparfait was high with durative predicates, particularly with aresultative ones, but it varied with position in the narratives, being highest at the beginning and lowest at the end. Although the children also used the imparfait frequently with durative predicates, they overgeneralized it to punctual resultative ones, regardless of conditions and of positions. These results show that adult uses of the imperfective/perfective distinction are determined by both predicate properties and grounding in narrative context. The children are less sensitive to some predicate properties than the adults and they do not differentiate imperfective/perfective aspect consistently as a function of discourse context.     

Subject-verb agreement errors in written productions: A study of French children and adults

This experiment was designed to simulate the conditions for subject-verb agreement errors, which are rarely but regularly observed in highly educated adults. Twenty-four adults and 24 children (12 years old) were orally presented with sentences to write. The sentences were in the French past indicative (the imperfect tense) and were of two types, asfollows: Noun 1 [subject of the verb]+Verb 1+Noun 2 [object of the verb] and(Adverbial phrase)+Pronoun 1+Pronoun 2+Verb 2+ (adverbial phrase). The adverbial phrase appeared either at the beginning or the end of the sentence. The conditions were the following: Noun 1 (and Pronoun 1) and Noun 2 (and Pronoun 2) were either matched or mismatched in number, and the sentences were either followed or not by a series of five words to be memorized. Most adults made errors when the two pronouns differed in number. But, in contrast to the results of studies using the present indicative, the extra cognitive load (the word series) did not lead to more errors. The children also made errors when the two pronouns differed, and did so whatever the cognitive load. The position of the adverbial phrase did not influence the error ratio. With the imperfect tense, it seems that making the verb number agree with its subject cannot be considered as a cognitively automatic and effortless activity, even for adults.     

Task determinants of ear differences in melody processing

In Experiment 1 nonmusicians were presented with dichotic melodies, which differed either on all pitches or by a single note, followed by a set of four binaural melodies. They were asked to recognize among the alternatives only one member of the dichotic pair in the “single-focus” task, and both dichotic melodies in the “double-focus” task. These different attention requirements led to a LEA in the first task which contrasted with the REA observed in the other task when melodies differed by all pitches. A possible confounding (fusion of the common pitches) prevents comparison of the tasks for melodies differing by a single pitch. The role of the extent of melody differences was further investigated in a second experiment by changing melodies on one, two, or three notes. No effect of material was observed on ear asymmetries. Task demands appeared as the most critical determinant of ear differences and are discussed in terms of their particular influence on the adoption of an analytic or holistic processing mode. Male subjects were found to be more responsive than females to analytic processing suggestions.     

On the role of visual afferent information for the control of aiming movements toward targets of different sizes

The authors investigated (a). whether the specificity of practice hypothesis is mediated by the importance of visual afferent information for the control of manual aiming movements and (b). how movement planning and online correction processes to the movement initial impulse are affected by the withdrawal of visual information in transfer. In acquisition, participants (N = 40) aimed at targets of different sizes in a full-vision or in a target-only condition before being transferred to a target-only condition without knowledge of results. The results supported the hypothesis that learning is specific to the source or sources of afferent information that are more likely to ensure optimal performance. The results also suggested that individuals will not always use visual afferent information more extensively when aiming at a small rather than at a large target. Instead, in a temporally constrained task, the relative efficiency of visually based corrections appears to mediate how exclusively an individual will rely on online visual afferent information for movement control. Finally, the detailed kinematic analysis performed in the present study clearly indicated that online modifications to the movement primary impulse are possible, arguing for a continuous or pseudo-continuous control of relatively slow aiming movements on the basis of visual afferent input.     

Recognizing faces defined by texture gradients

Texture gradients can reveal surface orientation in a manner similar to shape from shading, and therefore provide an important cue for object recognition. In this study, we tested whether a complex 3-D object, such as a face, can be identified from texture gradients alone. The stimuli were laser-scanned faces for which the texture element was a fractal-noise pattern mapped onto the 3-D surface. An eight-alternative forced choice task was used in which participants matched a face defined by texture gradients to one of eight faces defined by shape from shading (Experiment 1) or by texture gradients (Experiment 2). On average, participants scored 24% and 18%, respectively, above chance in these experiments. Although this performance was much poorer than the performance based entirely on shape-from-shading stimuli (Experiment 3), the results suggest that texture gradient information may be used to recover surface geometry of complex objects.     

Brains that are out of tune but in time

It is estimated that about 4% of the general population may have amusia (or tone deafness). Congenital amusia is a lifelong disability for processing music despite normal intellectual, memory, and language skills. Here we present evidence that the disorder stems from a deficit in fine-grained pitch perception. Amusic and control adults were presented with monotonic and isochronous sequences of five tones (i.e., constant pitch and intertone interval). They were required to detect when the fourth tone was displaced in pitch or time. All amusic participants were impaired in detecting the pitch changes, and showed no sign of improvement with practice. In contrast, they detected time changes as well as control adults and exhibited similar improvements with practice. Thus, the degraded pitch perception seen in the amusic individuals cannot be ascribed to nonspecific problems with the task or to poor hearing in general. Rather, the data point to the presence of a congenital neural anomaly that selectively impairs pitch processing.