Defying a decadent democracy: a comparative study of the works of Paul Bourget and Emile Zola

Facing each other across the bitter political divide between Catholics and Republicans in late nineteenth century France, Paul Bourget and Emile Zola might seem at first glance to have little in common. Bourget, devoutly Catholic and monarchist, was a significant influence on Right wing thought and action: Zola devoted his career to the promotion of a scientific, positivist and anti-clerical Republic. Yet as this thesis seeks to demonstrate, the opposition between Bourget and Zola - and between bourgeois Catholics and Republicans on a wider scale - could conceal not only ambiguity but also considerable consensus, particularly with reference to the question of national decadence. Focusing on a variety of literary, critical and journalistic works, the thesis illuminates Zola's political and social thought while incorporating original research on Paul Bourget, whose ideological importance has long been neglected. The shared sense of the writer's moral mission is studied as a prelude to a wider investigation of the two novelists' attitudes to political, social and racial decadence, throughout which emphasis is given to common perceptions of the nature of national degeneration. Journalistic campaigns attacking the early Third Republic give an insight into common complaints of political stagnation, and the longing for scientific government and strong leadership; fears of decadence and disorder in the social sphere often reveal a similar degree of bourgeois consensus. Concern at racial degeneration was still more widespread, and frequently crossed political and religious boundaries. Yet while Bourget and Zola shared common preoccupations, their proposed solutions were nonetheless widely divergent, and similarity of mentality could make for irreconcilable differences, especially in the religious domain. This thesis aims to demonstrate how defiance of a decadent democracy co-existed with the inescapable revolutionary legacy, thus giving a three dimensional picture of the depths of conflict and consensus within a divided society

New Tests to Measure Individual Differences in Matching and Labelling Facial Expressions of Emotion, and Their Association with Ability to Recognise Vocal Emotions and Facial Identity

Although good tests are available for diagnosing clinical impairments in face expression processing, there is a lack of strong tests for assessing "individual differences"--that is, differences in ability between individuals within the typical, nonclinical, range. Here, we develop two new tests, one for expression perception (an odd-man-out matching task in which participants select which one of three faces displays a different expression) and one additionally requiring explicit identification of the emotion (a labelling task in which participants select one of six verbal labels). We demonstrate validity (careful check of individual items, large inversion effects, independence from nonverbal IQ, convergent validity with a previous labelling task), reliability (Cronbach's alphas of.77 and.76 respectively), and wide individual differences across the typical population. We then demonstrate the usefulness of the tests by addressing theoretical questions regarding the structure of face processing, specifically the extent to which the following processes are common or distinct: (a) perceptual matching and explicit labelling of expression (modest correlation between matching and labelling supported partial independence); (b) judgement of expressions from faces and voices (results argued labelling tasks tap into a multi-modal system, while matching tasks tap distinct perceptual processes); and (c) expression and identity processing (results argued for a common first step of perceptual processing for expression and identity).This research was supported by the Australian Research Council (http://www.arc.gov.au/) grant DP110100850 to RP and EM and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Cognition and its Disorders (CE110001021) http://www.ccd.edu.au. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript

Stable individual differences in strategies within, but not between, visual search tasks

A striking range of individual differences has recently been reported in three different visual search tasks. These differences in performance can be attributed to strategy, that is, the efficiency with which participants control their search to complete the task quickly and accurately. Here we ask if an individual's strategy and performance in one search task is correlated with how they perform in the other two. We tested 64 observers in the three tasks mentioned above over two sessions. Even though the test-retest reliability of the tasks is high, an observer's performance and strategy in one task did not reliably predict their behaviour in the other two. These results suggest search strategies are stable over time, but context-specific. To understand visual search we therefore need to account not only for differences between individuals, but also how individuals interact with the search task and context. These context-specific but stable individual differences in strategy can account for a substantial proportion of variability in search performance

A new theoretical approach to improving face recognition in disorders of central vision: Face caricaturing

Damage to central vision, of which age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the most common cause, leaves patients with only blurred peripheral vision. Previous approaches to improving face recognition in AMD have employed image manipulations designed to enhance early-stage visual processing (e.g., magnification, increased HSF contrast). Here, we argue that further improvement may be possible by targeting known properties of mid- and/or high-level face processing. We enhance identity-related shape information in the face by caricaturing each individual away from an average face. We simulate early- through late-stage AMD-blur by filtering spatial frequencies to mimic the amount of blurring perceived at approximately 10° through 30° into the periphery (assuming a face seen premagnified on a tablet computer).We report caricature advantages for all blur levels, for face viewpoints from front view to semiprofile, and in tasks involving perceiving differences in facial identity between pairs of people, remembering previously learned faces, and rejecting new faces as unknown. Results provide a proof of concept that caricaturing may assist in improving face recognition in AMD and other disorders of central vision

Do people have insight into their face recognition abilities?

Diagnosis of developmental or congenital prosopagnosia (CP) involves self-report of everyday face recognition difficulties, which are corroborated with poor performance on behavioural tests. This approach requires accurate self-evaluation. We examine the extent to which typical adults have insight into their face recognition abilities across four studies involving nearly 300 participants. The studies used five tests of face recognition ability: two that tap into the ability to learn and recognise previously unfamiliar faces (the Cambridge Face Memory Test, CFMT, Duchaine & Nakayama, 2006 and a newly devised test based on the CFMT but where the study phases involve watching short movies rather than viewing static faces – the CFMT-Films) and three that tap face matching (Benton Facial Recognition Test, BFRT, Benton, Sivan, Hamsher, Varney, & Spreen, 1983; and two recently devised sequential face matching tests). Self-reported ability was measured with the 15-item Kennerknecht et al. (2008) questionnaire; two single-item questions assessing face recognition ability; and a new 77-item meta-cognition questionnaire). Overall, we find that adults with typical face recognition abilities have only modest insight into their ability to recognise faces on behavioural tests. In a fifth study, we assess self-reported face recognition ability in people with CP and find that some people who expect to perform poorly on behavioural tests of face recognition do indeed perform poorly. However, it is not yet clear whether individuals within this group of poor performers have greater levels of insight (i.e., into their degree of impairment) than those with more typical levels of performance

Staging reconciliation : popular theatre and political Utopia in France in 1937

This article focuses on two mass spectacles performed in Paris stadiums in 1937, one Catholic and the other Communist, both of which sought to picture the ideal city with the working people at centre stage. By studying these productions in the light of recent research on fascist theatre and politics, and with reference to the debate on ‘modernity’ in interwar France, the article explores the French use of theatre in responding to the aesthetic, political and social challenge of representing the masses. The parallels between these two little-known productions can also be used to illuminate a wider rivalry to orchestrate the masses and to portray them as a united national community

Rival representations of the people during the French Popular Front, 1934-9

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

In two minds: Multiple attentional control settings in visual search

Many everyday tasks require that we search for multiple targets at once. Nevertheless, the manner in which attention allocation is governed in such tasks remains unclear. The aim of this thesis was to explore whether more than one attentional control setting can be maintained simultaneously. Firstly, I asked whether the capture of attention is contingent on attentional control settings for two target colours (Chapter 2). Participants completed spatial cueing tasks in which they searched for either of two possible target colours (e.g. red and green), varied unpredictably. Prior to the target, a spatially non-predictive colour singleton cue appeared at one of the possible target locations. In all five experiments, cues that matched either target colour captured attention and produced significant cueing effects, while irrelevantly coloured cues did not. This was the case even when the cue colour was not linearly separable from the target colours in colour space (Experiments 3 and 4), demonstrating that setting for multiple colours is not limited by linear separability. Moreover, the presence of capture by target-coloured cues did not depend on the match between the cue colour and the previous or subsequent target colour, which suggests that guidance by the two target colours remained relatively stable across the experiment. Finally, the results could not be explained by a single inhibitory set for irrelevant distractor colours (Experiment 4 and 5). I concluded that the data were most consistent with the maintenance of multiple attentional control settings for colour. In Chapter 3, these findings were extended to explore whether two different attentional control settings could be directed to separate spatial locations. Participants searched RSVP streams for multiple colour-location conjunction targets (e.g. green letters on the left and red letters on the right). Target coloured distractors that did not match either conjunction (i.e. red on the left or green on the right) nevertheless captured attention and interfered with performance. This occurred even when the targets were previewed early in the trial (Experiment 2), indicating that participants were unable to isolate feature sets to specific spatial regions. However, previewing the irrelevant conjunction distractors reduced their interference, an effect that was due to top-down rather than bottom-up factors (Experiments 3 and 4). The results suggest that it is possible to inhibit irrelevant conjunctions, thereby improving search performance for conjunction targets. Together, the findings from this thesis demonstrate that attention can be governed by multiple attentional control settings applied independently and in parallel at a featural level. By combining facilitative sets with top- down inhibition, selection of complex conjunction targets can be made more efficient