In the last few years, a growing number of studies have been devoted to affective disturbances in Alzheimer disease, AD. These studies showed that apathy is a symptom clearly distinct from depression, and that confusion between apathy and depression appears to be one major cause of variability in the assessment of the frequency of depression in AD. We present the results of four studies from ou...

Does a facial expression convey privileged information about a person’s mental state or is it a communicative act, divorced from “true” beliefs, desires and intentions? This question is often cast as a dichotomy between competing theoretical perspectives. Theorists like Ekman argue for the primacy of emotion as a determinant of nonverbal behavior: emotions “leak” and only indirectly serve socia...

There is a perceived dichotomy between evolutionary explanations for behaviour and social or cultural ones. In this essay, I attempt to dissolve this dichotomy by pointing out that organisms are susceptible to social or cultural influence because they have evolved mechanisms that make them so. I review two classes of evolutionary explanation for cultural variation, ‘evoked’ and ‘transmitted’ cu...

Over 90% of PDD patients show at least one neuropsychiatric symptom (NPS); in the 60-70% two or more NPS are present. Their incidence is important in terms of prognosis and severity of pathology. However, among all NPS, apathy is often the most disturbing, associated with greater caregiver's burden. Similar to other NPS, apathy may be due to a dysfunction of the nigrostriatal pathway, even thou...

Given a preference profile, a social dichotomy function partitions the set of alternatives into a set of approved alternatives and a set of disapproved alternatives. The Borda mean rule approves all alternatives with above-average Borda score, and disapproves alternatives with below-average Borda score. We show that the Borda mean rule is the unique social dichotomy function satisfying neutrali...

BACKGROUND It has been reported for over the past decade that the use of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI's) may associate with the emergence of apathy. The authors hypothesized that depressed patients treated with SSRI's would show more signs of apathy than patients treated with non-SSRI antidepressants. This case control study was conducted to investigate the possibility of the a...

Hydroxyl radical (OH) oxidation of toluene produces ring-retaining products: cresol and benzaldehyde, and ring-opening products: bicyclic intermediate compounds and epoxides. Here, firstand later-generation OH oxidation products from cresol and benzaldehyde are identified in laboratory chamber experiments. For benzaldehyde, first-generation ring-retaining products are identified, but later-gene...