DOCTORS HONORIS CAUSA PSP/IPSY

Conférences le mardi 8 avril de 15h à 17h30

Empirically Resolving Controversies in Clinical Psychology

Professeur Richard J. McNally
Most of my scientific work has concerned anxiety and related disorders. Early research involving Pavlovian fear conditioning experiments tested the preparedness theory of phobias, which holds that natural selection has rendered us especially vulnerable to developing intense fears of stimuli that threatened our distant ancestors. In subsequent experimental psychopathology research, I adapted paradigms from cognitive science to test hypotheses about mechanisms that figure in the etiology and maintenance of panic disorder, social phobia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). These methods, in turn, also helped resolve the intense controversy concerning reports of repressed and recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse (CSA). A second controversy concerns the call for trigger warnings in academia. The insistence that professors warn students of potentially distressing material arises from the worry that many students struggle with memories of trauma. Our research group has done experiments testing whether trigger warnings help (or harm) their intended beneficiaries. Finally, I will discuss a relatively new approach to conceptualizing psychopathology that differs dramatically from the categorical model that has underwritten our diagnostic systems. Pioneered by Dutch psychometricians, network psychometrics is controversial among traditional clinical psychologists, but it shows promise as illustrated by studies by my research group among others.

Communicating with written words: Cognitive, neural and historical bases

Professeure Brenda Rapp 
Written language is arguably the greatest of human inventions, allowing for the effective communication of knowledge across time and space. Our world and lives would be unrecognizable without the preservation and accumulation of knowledge that written language (reading and writing) has made possible. Furthermore, written language pervades daily lives across the globe as never before in human history, with the expansion of literacy and the rise of electronic communication such as e-mail and texting. This talk will review key historical, neural and cognitive aspects of written language. It will begin with the origins of written language and the key similarities and differences across different orthographic systems. With regard to the brain bases of written communication, written language is unlike other complex skills (e.g., spoken language, vision and navigation) whose brain development is exquisitely controlled by the genetic code. Because written language processing is so evolutionarily recent there has been no time for it to enter the human genome. Therefore, its study provides an opportunity to understand the neuroplastic properties that allow the brain to instantiate complex novel skills. Finally, in terms of cognitive processing, while it is clear that written language builds upon basic skills such as spoken language, object recognition and fine-motor functions, a fundamental question for researchers has been to understand the extent to which reading and writing are dependent upon or autonomous from these evolutionarily older skills. This talk will review key psycholinguistic, neuroimaging and neuropsychological evidence that has advanced our understanding of these issues.

A cognitive-ecological model of social cognition 

Professeur Pr Christian Unkelbach 
Social psychology investigates the interaction of individuals with their social environment. There is a wide array of models and theories for this interaction. However, theories and models of the social environment per se are scarce (see Reiss, 2008). I will present a general model regarding two broad claims about what we call people’s evaluative ecology: For most people most of the time, positive information is more frequent than negative information. Second, negative information is more diverse than positive information. I will first present evidence for these broad claims. Then, I will show how these two properties, in interaction with well-established cognitive principles, have broad explanatory potential for almost all domains of social cognition: person perception, intergroup biases, stereotyping, and evaluations in general. I will close with a discussion of the theoretical advantages and disadvantages of the presented cognitive-ecological model.

Séance académique le mardi 8 avril à 18h

Richard J. McNally Présenté par les professeur·e·s Alexandre Heeren et Céline Douilliez.