Évaluation de l'efficacité d'un entraînement mnésique chez des personnes très âgées dépressives institutionnalisées

The focus of this work is to study the influence of “memory's training” on a group of 27 depressed elderly residents (age's mean = 84.77; GDS's mean = 17.7) and 28 non-depressed elderly residents (age's mean = 84.96; GDS's mean = 3.5) with self-reported memory loss. The training's task was a free recall using mmemonic method of Loci with each person. Results showed that depressed residents increase their performances during the training's sessions like non-depressed residents but not to the post-test. Consequently, the memory complaint is an indicator to propose to elderly person memory's training if the prevalence of depression is establish, so it is to be hoped that further or additional interventions be proposed.     

Affect and Affect Regulation Strategies Reciprocally Influence Each Other in Daily Life: The Case of Positive Reappraisal,Problem-Focused Coping,Appreciation and Rumination

Feelings of positive or negative affect are not restricted to temporary states. They can also determine future affective experiences, by influencing the building of an individual’s personal resources. The present study was designed to understand the daily fluctuations in positive and negative affect more fully. To this end, we examined the involvement of a variety of affect regulation strategies in these fluctuations. The affect regulation strategies we explored included positive reappraisal, problem-focused coping, appreciation and rumination. We adopted an experience sampling method, consisting of five daily assessments over a 2-week period. As expected, within a few hours of experiencing more positive affect, participants engaged in greater positive reappraisal, problem-focused coping and appreciation. In turn, greater use of each of these three strategies was followed by more intense experiences of positive affect. We observed analogous reciprocal influences between rumination and the experience of negative affect, within the same time interval. Changes in affective experience over several hours were also directly influenced by concurrent use of these strategies. More specifically, greater positive reappraisal, problem-focused coping and appreciation accelerated the rise in positive affect that follows low feelings of positive affect, and slowed the decline in positive affect that follows high feelings. Rumination had an analogous influence on change in negative affect. The clinical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Four hours of paradoxical sleep deprivation impairs alternation performance in a water maze in the rat

Sixteen rats were deprived of paradoxical sleep (PS) for 4 h using the "flower pot" technique and 16 other served as yoked controls. PS-deprived and control rats then had to learn a water maze using either a standard allocentric configuration (i.e., finding the submerged platform using external cues; n = 6/group) or an alternation version (goal platform alternating between two locations; n 10/group). Rats were submitted to six trials with a cutoff time of 60 s and an intertrial interval of 5 min. Criterion was set as two consecutive successful completions. PS-deprived rats made more quadrant entries and took more time to reach criterion on the alternation task than control rats while both groups were equal on the allocentric task. Based on lesion studies (Ethier et al., this issue) we propose that tasks that require an intact medial prefrontal cortex are particularly sensitive to PS deprivation.     

The emergence of coherence over the course of decision making

Previous research has indicated that decision making is accompanied by an increase in the coherence of assessments of the factors related to the decision alternatives. In the present study, the authors investigated whether this coherence shift is obtained before people commit to a decision, and whether it is obtained in the course of a number of other processing tasks. College students were presented with a complex legal case involving multiple conflicting arguments. Participants rated agreement with the individual arguments in isolation before seeing the case and after processing it under various initial sets, including playing the role of a judge assigned to decide the case. Coherence shifts were observed when participants were instructed to delay making the decision (Experiment 1), to memorize the case (Experiment 2), and to comprehend the case (Experiment 3). The findings support the hypothesis that a coherence-generating mechanism operates in a variety of processing tasks, including decision making.     

小剂量酒精伤害驾驶行为的时序效应

酒后开车普遍存在并致交通肇事居高不下的现实,对法定酒精限量的科学性提出质疑.本实验在多数国家交通法规采用的体内血液酒精水平BAL＜0.5‰的标准以下,设计三项任务对12名被试在酒前酒后四段时间内的行为实施测试,结果表明个体无法准确估计安全的酒精摄入量;小剂量酒精仍具有伤害行为的效应;酒精影响依行为复杂程度呈现时序效应.     

Predicting women's and men's reactions to geographic separation: relational interdependence matters

Participant sex and a theorized correlate of biological sex, relational interdependence, were tested as relative predictors of the extent to which daters 1) missed and 2) used emotional support to cope when geographically separated from their dating partners. One hundred twenty-four daters completed multiple measures of missing and coping during their colleges' winter breaks. Results from regression analyses indicated that levels of missing and seeking emotional support differed as a function of biological sex. Further, relational interdependence was reliably associated with missing and seeking emotional support in theoretically consistent ways. Mediation analyses highlighted the importance of considering relational interdependence or other individual differences that covary with biological sex when studying close relationship phenomena.     

Mixed emotions: holistic and analytic perception of facial expressions

In the face literature, it is debated whether the identification of facial expressions requires holistic (i.e., whole face) or analytic (i.e., parts-based) information. In this study, happy and angry composite expressions were created in which the top and bottom face halves formed either an incongruent (e.g., angry top + happy bottom) or congruent composite expression (e.g., happy top + happy bottom). Participants reported the expression in the target top or bottom half of the face. In Experiment 1, the target half in the incongruent condition was identified less accurately and more slowly relative to the baseline isolated expression or neutral face conditions. In contrast, no differences were found between congruent and the baseline conditions. In Experiment 2, the effects of exposure duration were tested by presenting faces for 20, 60, 100 and 120 ms. Interference effects for the incongruent faces appeared at the earliest 20 ms interval and persisted for the 60, 100 and 120 ms intervals. In contrast, no differences were found between the congruent and baseline face conditions at any exposure interval. In Experiment 3, it was found that spatial alignment impaired the recognition of incongruent expressions, but had no effect on congruent expressions. These results are discussed in terms of holistic and analytic processing of facial expressions.     

Children's understanding of ambiguous idioms and conversational perspective-taking

The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that conversational perspective-taking is a determinant of unfamiliar ambiguous idiom comprehension. We investigated two types of ambiguous idiom, decomposable and nondecomposable expressions, which differ in the degree to which the literal meanings of the individual words contribute to the overall idiomatic meaning. We designed an experiment to assess the relationship between the acquisition of figurative comprehension and conversational perspective-taking. Our sample of children aged 5-7 years performed three conversational perspective-taking tasks (language acts, shared/unshared information, and conversational maxims). They then listened to decomposable and nondecomposable idiomatic expressions presented in context before performing a multiple-choice task (figurative, literal, and contextual responses). Results indicated that decomposable idiom comprehension was predicted by conversational perspective-taking scores and language skills, whereas nondecomposable idiom comprehension was predicted solely by language skills. We discuss our findings with respect to verbal and pragmatic skills.