Le risque médico-judiciaire des infections nosocomiales

These last years in France, the term ‘nosocomial infection’ has been replaced by ‘health-care associated infection’, which has a much broader definition. In all cases, the plausibility of the association between infection and the care provided deserved to be rigorously analyzed. To qualify an infection as nosocomial, the expert witness must at the judge's request determine that infection actually occurred within the health facility and is linked to health care. French Public Health Code as well the most recent jurisprudence give currently a rather close definition of nosocomial infection. The principle of faultness liability in the field of nosocomial infection has been enshrined in the law of March 4^th 2002, the most severe situations (death; permanent functional deficit > 25 percent) being compensated by ONIAM, the French national office of compensation for nosocomial infection.     

Biased extensive measurement: The general case

We develop a theory of biased extensive measurement which allows us to prove the existence of a ratio-scale without transitivity of indifference and with a property of homothetic invariance weaker than independence. These representations, which cover the cases of interval orders and of semiorders, reveal a unique biasing function smaller or equal to 1 that distorts extensive measurement and explains departures from its standard axioms. We interpret this biasing function as characterizing the qualitative influence of the underlying measurement process and we show that it induces a proportional indifference threshold.     

Parafoveal letter-position coding in reading

The masked-priming lexical decision task has been the paradigm of choice for investigating how readers code for letter identity and position. Insight into the temporal integration of information between prime and target words has pointed out, among other things, that readers do not code for the absolute position of letters. This conception has spurred various accounts of the word recognition process, but the results at present do not favor one account in particular. Thus, employing a new strategy, the present study moves out of the arena of temporal- and into the arena of spatial information integration. We present two lexical decision experiments that tested how the processing of six-letter target words is influenced by simultaneously presented flanking stimuli (each stimulus was presented for 150 ms). We manipulated the orthographic relatedness between the targets and flankers, in terms of both letter identity (same/different letters based on the target’s outer/inner letters) and letter position (intact/reversed order of letters and of flankers, contiguous/noncontiguous flankers). Target processing was strongly facilitated by same-letter flankers, and this facilitatory effect was modulated by both letter/flanker order and contiguity. However, when the flankers consisted of the target’s inner-positioned letters alone, letter order no longer mattered. These findings suggest that readers may code for the relative position of letters using words’ edges as spatial points of reference. We conclude that the flanker paradigm provides a fruitful means to investigate letter-position coding in the fovea and parafovea.     

Outcome evaluation in brief mother-infant psychotherapies: Report on 75 cases

The effects of brief mother–infant psychotherapies (maximum of 10 sessions) were examined in cases of functional and behavioral disturbances in children less than 30 months old. Seventy-five mother-infant dyads were assessed prior to treatment, at 1 week, and 6 months after therapy ended. The outcome measures were changes in the infant's symptoms, the behavioral interactions between mother and infant, and maternal representations. The effect of two forms of intervention—Psychodynamic Therapy and Interaction Guidance Therapy—were compared. Results indicated a significant symptom reduction; dyadic interactions became more harmonious (mothers became less intrusive and infants more cooperative). Maternal self-esteem grew significantly and negative affects decreased. Improvements lasted as least several months, with some positive improvement detected at the 6-month follow-up. No major difference in outcome was found between the effects of the two forms of intervention. Within the limitations of research in a clinical context, this study suggests that brief mother–infant psychotherapies are a cost-effective method of early intervention.     

Le modèle écoculturel: un cadre pour la psychologie culturelle comparative

The main goal of this article is to examine the epistemological foundations of the contemporary cross‐cultural psychology from a constructivist point of view. We argue for the necessity of heuristic paradigms like the eco‐cultural framework of John Berry. Such an approach can be considered as a systemic modelling of complex phenomena by a psychologist (e.g., the relations of “mind‐brain‐culture” as well as their development). At the individual level, we argue the necessity to surpass the classic distinction between competence and performance. Competences are differentiated here as “intuitive representations” (or elementary mental functions) and “reflective representations” (or superior mental functions). Intuitive and reflective representations remain at the origin of both behaviour and performance. Such systemic conception allows the theoretical possibility of a “relativist constructivism” that could be more suitable than the “absolutist constructivism” proposed by Jean Piaget.     

The Williams syndrome cognitive profile

Williams syndrome is a rare neurodevelopmental disorder caused by a hemizygous deletion of approximately 1.5 megabases on chromosome 7q11.23. In this article, we outline a Williams Syndrome Cognitive Profile (WSCP) that operationalizes the cognitive characteristics of the syndrome using measures of absolute and relative performance on subtests of the Differential Abilities Scales (Elliot, 1990a). Testing confirmed excellent sensitivity and specificity scores for the WSCP. Seventy-four of 84 individuals with Williams syndrome fit the WSCP while only 4 participants in a contrast group met all of the WSCP criteria. It was also found that the WSCP does not vary greatly with chronological age or overall level of cognitive ability for individuals with Williams syndrome. Possible applications for the WSCP include psychoeducational evaluation and empirical research such as the search for genotype/phenotype relations in this genetically based syndrome.