Focus socio-psychologique sur la crise politique belge de 2011: Entretien croisé avec Valérie Rosoux et René Zayan

In the following pages, the political crisis that Belgium experienced in 2007-2011 is put under a socio-psychological light, thanks to a discussion led by Stéphane Baele (University of Namur) with two leading experts in political psychology and philosophy and acute observers of the Belgian political scene. Even if their methods and theoretical assumptions differ, Prof. Rosoux and Prof. Zayan (both at Université catholique de Louvain) offer together a fresh, complex, original frame of understanding of Belgian record-breaking governmental negotiations.Dans ces pages, nous plaçons la situation politique belge actuelle sous la lumière de l’analyse socio-psychologique. Répondant aux questions de Stéphane Baele (Université de Namur), le Professeur René Zayan (Université catholique de Louvain) et la Professeur Valérie Rosoux (Université catholique de Louvain), tous deux experts en psychologie sociale et politique, donnent ici en chassé-croisé une lecture décalée de la crise de formation gouvernementale qu’a connue la Belgique en 2007-2011. Leurs approches, différentes mais complémentaires, mettent en avant des éléments comme le charisme, le traumatisme, ou les représentations mentales

The Specificity of Social Stress

This paper attempts to clarify the concept of "social stress" as implicitly understood in the ethological literature. With respect to the general characteristics of stressors and stress responses, the concept when applied to crowding or to encounters with unfamiliar conspecifics does not appear to denote a specific process. The concept is more specific when it refers to the psychological (emotional, perceptive or cognitive) processes that accompany "behavioural stress", e.g. agonistic interactions and subordination experience. The concept of "sociological stress" is proposed to denote the very specific process whereby stress responses of individuals result from a group's social structure, and whereby the former determine the latter via behavioural interactions and the other types of couplings (e.g. perceptive) between the group-members. Finally, it is submitted that social stress at the group level may not be adequately reflected by traditional hormonal indicators of physiological stress

Les determinants de l'agressivite de la dominance et de la defense territoriale chez xiphophorus (pisces, poeciliidae).+ annexes. ( 2 vol.)

Thèse de doctorat -- Université catholique de Louvain, 197

Mental Representations in the Recognition of Conspecific Individuals

Individual recognition requires that animals form mental representations of the, properties of conspecifics as well as of the identity of particular conspecifics. Gallistel has defined representations as a precise correspondence (an isomorphism) between objects and relations in the environment and structure-preserving systems in the animal's brain. Research on the neural recognition of individual conspecifics is examined to check whether the results satisfy part of Gallistel's definition. Mental representations are also discussed with reference to concept-discrimination experiments which have demonstrated individual recognition using slides of conspecifics. Finally, a simple set-theoretical model is presented to describe recognition of the idiosyncratic properties of conspecifics