Edith Salès-Wuillemin

Differences between donors and non-donors in social representation of blood donation: an empirical study

BACKGROUND Both donors and non-donors have a positive image of blood donation, so donors and non-donors do not differ regarding their views on donation but do differ in converting their opinion into an active deed of donation. Several studies have identified altruism and empathy as the main factors underlying blood donation. However, a mixture of various motivational factors mould the complex behaviour of donation. This paper presents an exploratory study on differences of social representations of blood donation between blood donors and non-donors, in order to understand the reasons that bring someone to take the decision to become a blood donor. MATERIALS AND METHODS Participants filled in the Adapted Self-Report Altruism Scale, Toronto Empathy Questionnaire and answered a test of verbal association. Descriptive and correlation analyses were carried out on quantitative data, while a prototypic analysis was used for qualitative data. RESULTS The study was carried out on a convenience sample of 786 individuals, 583 donors (mean age: 35.40 years, SD: 13.01 years; 39.3% female) and 203 non-donors (mean age: 35.10 years, SD: 13.30 years; 67.5% female). Social representations of donors seem to be more complex and articulated than those of non-donors. The terms that appear to be central were more specific in donors (life, needle, blood, help, altruism were the words most associated by non-donors; life, aid, altruism, solidarity, health, love, gift, generosity, voluntary, control, needed, useful, needle were the words most associated by donors). Furthermore, non-donors associated a larger number of terms referring to negative aspects of blood donation. DISCUSSION Aspects related to training and the accuracy of any information on blood donation seem to be important in the decision to become a donor and stabilise the behaviour of donation over time, thus ensuring the highest levels of quality and safety in blood establishments.

When Belief Ascriptions Are About More Than What Is on Someone Else's Mind

The third-person belief ascription, “Marie believes that the contract is in the cabinet,” may engender two interpretations: (1) It neutrally describes what is on Maries mind and (2) it offers indirect evidence about reality, committing the speaker to the cabinet as the most likely location. The circumstances that lead to the evidential interpretation are at present not well documented in the case of belief verbs. In the case of belief-dependent verbs with and without embedding clause syntax, for example, “Marie says that the contract is in the archive,” and “Marie is lookingfor the contract in the archive,” it has been claimed that they eschew the evidential interpretation altogether. We explore the influence of the pragmatic context on the third-person, present tense and first-person, past tense use of the verbs, believe, say, and look for. In three experiments that manipulated the discourse context, 258 adults rated written vignettes. Regardless of the verb and the tense, when presented in discourse contexts without prior shared knowledge of the location of the object in question, the belief ascription was interpreted as indirect evidence. The results illuminate the border area between semantics and pragmatics, particularly regarding evidential uses of belief and belief-dependent verbs.

Source unreliability decreases but does not cancel the impact of social information on metacognitive evaluations

Through metacognitive evaluations, individuals assess their own cognitive operations with respect to their current goals. We have previously shown that non-verbal social cues spontaneously influence these evaluations, even when the cues are unreliable. Here, we explore whether a belief about the reliability of the source can modulate this form of social impact. Participants performed a two-alternative forced choice task that varied in difficulty. The task was followed by a video of a person who was presented as being either competent or incompetent at performing the task. That person provided random feedback to the participant through facial expressions indicating agreement, disagreement or uncertainty. Participants then provided a metacognitive evaluation by rating their confidence in their answer. Results revealed that participants’ confidence was higher following agreements. Interestingly, this effect was merely reduced but not canceled for the incompetent individual, even though participants were able to perceive the individual’s incompetence. Moreover, perceived agreement induced zygomaticus activity, but only when the feedback was provided for difficult trials by the competent individual. This last result strongly suggests that people implicitly appraise the relevance of social feedback with respect to their current goal. Together, our findings suggest that people always integrate social agreement into their metacognitive evaluations, even when epistemic vigilance mechanisms alert them to the risk of being misinformed.

Intérêts de l'étude des représentations sociales de la drogue pour un dispositif de veille sanitaire

Ancre dans une demarche de veille sanitaire, le dispositif Trend permet de decrire l’evolution des tendances de consommation de substances psychoactives dans le milieu festif parisien. Dans une autre perspective, les recherches portant sur les representations de l’usage de drogues apportent un cadre theorique et des methodes qui peuvent s’averer utiles dans une demarche de sante publique. La recherche que nous avons menee presente une application possible de l’etude des representations d’usagers rencontres lors d’investigations de terrain. Dans ce cadre, 10 entretiens d’explication ont ete menes afin de decrire les logiques de pensee, d’action et de valeur partagees par les personnes interrogees. Les resultats decrivent les liens entre les differents concepts-cles de la representation sur trois registres de connaissances : descriptif, fonctionnel et evaluatif. Les conclusions apportent des preconisations sur les axes potentiels d’interventions dans le champ de la reduction des risques.