Les interventions préventives en santé mentale du jeune enfant vues par leurs bénéficiaires : l’exemple du projet CAPEDP

ObjectiveHome-visiting programs have become one of the most popular early childhood interventions, though their impact on parents and children remain uncertain. Outcomes measures often rely on experimental quantitative design and little space is offered for the voices of those served by these interventions. This paper presents the results of a qualitative protocol performed by the research team with participants in the CAPEDP project which took place in France from 2005 to 2011.MethodAll 184 women who had accepted at least one home visit in the CAPEDP programme were contacted and invited to participate. Individual and group interviews were conducted with the first 16 who accepted to participate. The semi-structured interview schedule addressed their overall appreciation of the project, their initial concerns, the quality of their relationship with their home visiting psychologist, positive and negative aspects of the intervention and any recommendations they might have for future interventions. Interviews were recorded, transcribed and anonymised. An inductive categorical thematic analysis was performed by the research team.ResultsParticipants expressed overall satisfaction with the CAPEDP intervention, underlining the quality of the relationships with the home visitors, usefulness of parental guidance, the fact that the intervention could be adapted to suit their own personal agenda, routine and needs, the importance of learning how to accept help and give help to others. Less positive aspects included the fact that the home visitors were not mothers themselves and that they lacked technical experience, the difficulty ending the relationship at the end of the 27-month project, insufficient integration of fathers, the difficult and time-consuming evaluation protocol and the lack of interaction with other parents during the intervention.ConclusionAlthough mothers who accepted to participate in the qualitative interview schedule may have had a more positive overall experience of the CAPEDP project than those who declined to participate, participants’ points of view provide potentially useful indications for adapting future home-visiting programs to the French context.     

Links Among Cognitive Empathy,Theory of Mind,and Affective Perspective Taking by Young Children

The authors investigated the development of the affective, cognitive, and behavioral components of empathy in preschoolers, specifically examining how cognitive empathy is linked to theory of mind and affective perspective taking. Participants were 158 children aged 4–6 years. They listened to narratives and then answered questions about the protagonists' emotions. The affective component was probed with the question, “How do you feel seeing the little girl/boy?”; the cognitive component with the question, “Why do you feel [emotion shared with the character]?”; and the behavioral one with the question, “What would you do if you were next to the little boy/girl [experiencing an emotional scenario]?” Results revealed a developmental sequence in the self-focused attribution of cognitive empathy, and a trend toward a developmental sequence for behavioral empathy, which underwent a slight linear increase between 4 and 6 years old. Affective empathy remained stable. More interestingly, they showed that cognitive empathy is linked to both theory of mind and affective perspective taking.     

Resilience and Coping Intervention with Children and Adolescents in At-Risk Neighborhoods

This study evaluated the Resilience and Coping Intervention for Children (RCI), a group intervention to increase coping skills and resilience in children and adolescents. RCI was delivered to children and adolescents residing in five at-risk neighborhoods in a southern U.S. city. Children’s and adolescents’ self-report of coping strategies, strengths and difficulties with behaviors and emotions, and hope indicated decreased difficulties with behavior and emotions and increased feelings of hope postintervention. Parent report of difficulties with behavior and emotions revealed a significant decrease in children but not in adolescents. Mean scores for four coping dimensions increased, but the increase was not statistically significant.     

The effects of sport dance on brain connectivity and body intelligence

Dancing is characterised by physical movement in accordance with rhythm perception. Twelve sport dancers and 12 age- and sex-matched young adults who had no dance experience (control group) were recruited. Body intelligence and brain activity were assessed in both groups using the Body Intelligence Scale (BIS) and resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging. BIS scores of dancers were higher than those of control subjects. The dancer group showed increased functional connectivity from the precentral gyrus to the right cingulate gyrus, right occipital fusiform gyrus, right inferior frontal gyrus, right medial frontal gyrus, left inferior frontal gyrus, right parietal postcentral gyrus, and right frontal lobe compared with control subjects. Sport dancers had increased body intelligence sensitivity compared with matched controls. In addition, the characteristics of dance, including physical movement in accordance with rhythm perception, might be associated with increased brain activity in the somatosensory and rhythm perception networks.     

A Patient-Tailored Evidence-Based Approach for Developing Early Neuropsychological Training Programs in Addiction Settings

Neuropsychology Review - Substance use disorders (SUDs) are associated with impairments of cognitive functions, and cognitive training programs are thus rapidly developing in SUD treatment....     

How Does Explicit Versus Implicit Risk Information Influence Adolescent Risk‐Taking Engagement?

Adolescents have been shown to be more likely to engage in risky behaviors in daily life. Many studies have indicated that adolescents could make advantageous choices when they receive explicit information but could fail to choose advantageously when they are not informed about risks. The current study aimed to examine the influence of explicit risk information (i.e., when risk information is directly available) versus implicit risk information (i.e., when risk information has to be learned from feedback) on risk‐taking engagement, in order to clarify whether the enhanced risk‐taking observed in decision making under ambiguity in adolescents results from either a greater exploration of ambiguous situations (i.e., a higher ambiguity tolerance) or a specific difficulty associated with learning based on previous choices' outcomes. Adolescents and young adults completed a new adaptation of the Balloon Analogue Risk Task. They were required to accumulate as many points as possible by inflating balloons associated with variable break points and avoiding explosions. This adaptation involved a manipulation of the information level with two conditions, an “informed” condition and a “noninformed” condition, in which the participants had to learn the matching of colors with balloons' resistances based on feedback. The results demonstrated that providing explicit risk information allows adolescents to be as efficient as adults at the end of the game. In contrast, adolescents failed to adjust risk‐taking to the balloon resistance in the noninformed condition. These findings critically suggest that this failure reflects a specific impairment of feedback‐based learning ability but not a global excess of risk‐taking during adolescence. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Newborns' face recognition is based on spatial frequencies below 0.5 cycles per degree

A critical question in Cognitive Science concerns how knowledge of specific domains emerges during development. Here we examined how limitations of the visual system during the first days of life may shape subsequent development of face processing abilities. By manipulating the bands of spatial frequencies of face images, we investigated what is the nature of the visual information that newborn infants rely on to perform face recognition. Newborns were able to extract from a face the visual information lying from 0 to 1 cpd (Experiment 1), but only a narrower 0-0.5 cpd spatial frequency range was successful to accomplish face recognition (Experiment 2). These results provide the first empirical support of a low spatial frequency advantage in individual face recognition at birth and suggest that early in life low-level, non-specific perceptual constraints affect the development of the face processing system.     

Selecting from dynamic environments: attention distinguishes between blinking and moving

Pinto, Olivers, and Theeuwes (2006) showed that a static target can be efficiently found among different types of dynamically changing distractors. They hypothesized that attention employs a broad division between static and dynamic information, a hypothesis that conforms with earlier research. In the present study, we investigated whether attention can only make use of this crude division or can exploit more subtle discriminations within the dynamic domain. In Experiment 1, participants were able to efficiently find a blinking target among moving distractors and moving targets among blinking distractors, although all items changed at the same rate and produced the same change in local luminance. In Experiment 2, search for a dynamic target among dynamic distractors was aided when we gave the distractors additional dynamic cues. Experiment 3 showed that making the displays equiluminant affected search efficiency for a static target among moving distractors, but not among blinking distractors. The findings refute the broad division hypothesis and suggest that object continuity plays an important role in selection.     

Can Sex‐Undifferentiated Teacher Expectations Mask an Influence of Sex Stereotypes?Alternative Forms of Sex Bias in Teacher Expectations1

This research investigated different forms of sex bias in teacher expectations relative to gymnastics performance. First, a laboratory experiment including 163 physical education teachers confirmed that stereotypes favorable to boys may influence teacher expectations in gymnastics. Next, a naturalistic study involving 15 teachers and 422 students showed that teachers expected no sex differences, even though girls performed better than boys. However, this sex bias was a result of reliance on nondiagnostic student personal characteristics favorable to boys, rather than on a stereotype per se. These results suggest that egalitarian beliefs may mask a bias in favor of a social group when group differences actually exist, and that sex‐biased teacher expectations do not inevitably involve an influence of sex stereotypes.     

Cadre et concepts-clés de la psychologie communautaire

Community psychology has been developed since the 1960s in North America, whereas its development is much more recent in Europe. It differs from traditional models of psychology by its conception of users and communities as collaborators. This field requires from psychologists that they extend their competencies to prevention and mental health promotion. It lays on a positive conception of the individual and of health, and seeks the investment of users in the development of local mental health models and resources. This paper aims at presenting the history of community psychology, its conceptual framework and its specificities, with regards to traditional models.