Consciousness in French

Posted by:

Alfredo Pereira Jr (group admin)

Date:

21 December 2007

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I post the abstract of two interesting recent papers written in French language (Source: PubMed)

1: Psychol Neuropsychiatr Vieil. 2007 Dec;5(4):249-60.

[Consciousness and emotion.]

[Article in French]

Carton S.

Université Montpellier III Paul-Valéry, Département de psychologie, Section de
psychologie clinique, Montpellier.

This article focuses on the processes that lead to awareness of our own emotions,
which deserve particular attention in contemporary models of emotional
consciousness. The subjective component of emotion, or emotional experience, was
for a long time the most neglected aspect in the study of emotions although it
already constituted the initial point of discussion in the famous William James
still asked question : What is an emotion? More than a century later,
contemporary theories debate about this heritage. We examine the successive
historic contributions to the question of the determinants of our own emotional
experience: from James-Lange bodily changes to cognitive appraisal theories, also
relating the major role that the fundamental emotions theory attributed to facial
expressions. Twenty years after the debate about primacy of cognition or emotion,
both physiological-somatic and cognitive components are integrated in
contemporary approaches to emotions. However, their respective degree of
implication varies according to the different levels of emotional consciousness
which are modelized. It is on the last level that present models focuse, level
that leads to consciousness of our emotional experience, benefiting from the
contributions of cognitive neurosciences. Models differ according to the role
devoted to neuronal substrates in determining emotional experience, but they
converge on the specification of a last level of consciousness, which is the only
one that allows the subject to be conscious of emotion as it is experienced
(feeling) and that what he is experiencing is an emotion. Then, different models
of emotional consciousness account for different varieties of emotion experience
and also for various cases of << unconscious >> emotions, that is occurrence of
emotion with a lack of awareness.

Publication Types: English Abstract

PMID: 18048103 [PubMed – in process]

2: Psychol Neuropsychiatr Vieil. 2007 Nov 30;5(4):261-267.

[A scientific model of consciousness: implications for neuropsychiatic diseases.]

[Article in French]

Gaillard R, Del Cul A.

Unité Inserm 566, Neuro imagerie cognitive, Centre neurospin CEA/SAC/DSV/DRM,
Gif-sur-Yvette.

Consciousness is an essential property of human cognition. According to the <<
Global neuronal workspace >> hypothesis designed by Dehaene et al., consciousness
results from amplification and synchronisation of distant processors.
Frontoparietal loops play a crucial role in this large scale synchronisation. At
any given time, many modular cerebral networks are active in parallel and process
information unconsciously. An information becomes conscious, however, if the
neural population that represents it is mobilized by top-down attentional
amplification into a brain-scale state of coherent activity. This long-distance
connectivity makes the information available to a variety of processes including
perceptual categorization, long-term memorization, evaluation, and intentional
action. Behavioral as well as neuroimaging studies using masked subliminal
perception support this theoretical view. Among neuropsychiatric disorders, many
neuroscientific studies have been devoted to schizophrenia. Some of them conclude
on a global brain dysconnectivity rather than on specific and localised
perturbations. Hence conscious integration may be the core deficit in cognitive
disabilities observed in schizophrenia. As shown in recent results, threshold for
access to consciousness in schizophrenic patients compared with controls is
elevated whereas unconscious processes, such as the ones involved in subliminal
priming remain effective. We conclude on the potential use of the “global
neuronal workspace” model in other neuropsychiatric diseases such as Alzheimer’s
disease or multiple sclerosis.

PMID: 18048104 [PubMed – as supplied by publisher]

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