Virtual action planning in Parkinson's disease: a control study.

Cognitive planning deficits affect patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) and traditional psychometric tests meet difficulties to evaluate their impact on daily life activities. Virtual reality (VR) may provide a new means of assessment. The objective of this study was firstly to develop a virtual environment (VE) useful to explore planning and secondly to examine the effectiveness of using VR in the assessment of cognitive planning for patients with PD. A virtual supermarket (VS) was designed in which participants carried out a task close to daily activities: a test of shopping list. There were two preliminary sessions to familiarize the participants with the software and the supermarket's layout. Then, during the assessment session, participants completed the task, without any time limitation. Global intellectual efficiency was assessed in order to exclude patients with dementia. Data related to the performance in the VS were recorded. Five patients with PD and five age-matched healthy volunteers, meeting inclusion criteria, constituted our convenience sample. The patients did not perform as well as the control group. In particular, the session's duration and the distance covered were longer. The patients' path is specific with numerous stops, turning around, and hesitancies. Finally, their motivation for further training sessions is aroused. The results underline the potential of using VR in the assessment of cognitive planning in PD. A larger analysis is currently being carried out to confirm and to explore all the outcome measures.     

The interest gap: how gender stereotype endorsement about abilities predicts differences in academic interests

This study used a novel approach to examine the link between gender ability stereotype endorsement and academic interests by examining not only stereotypes people hold within the domains of mathematics and language arts, but also between them. Grade 6 and 8 students (285 males, 363 females) reported their degree of stereotype endorsement and interest in these two academic domains. Results of path analyses revealed that stereotype endorsement within and between domains accounted for gender differences in interest. In language arts, endorsing a stereotype that females are more competent than males predicted subsequent interest in the domain and accounted for the greater language arts interest among females. In mathematics, however, the perception that males are more competent in mathematics relative to language arts was linked to students’ interest in this domain and accounted for the interest gap between genders. These results suggest that students’ interests relate to endorsed stereotypes that are either driven by a perceived gender superiority within one domain—when females are viewed as more competent than males in language arts—or a gender superiority between two domains—when males are viewed as more competent in mathematics relative to language arts. Considering not only stereotypes favoring a gender within one domain, but also between domains, provides a more accurate portrait of students’ actual stereotypes and can be useful to better understanding how the interest gap emerges.

     

Anxiety and the interpretation of ambiguous information: beyond the emotion-congruent effect

The authors investigated how anxiety influences the use of contextual information in the resolution of ambiguity. Participants heard ambiguous homophones (threat/neutral, positive/neural, and neutral/neutral) with related contextual information. State anxiety was manipulated experimentally. The interpretations of anxious participants were influenced by context to a greater extent than those of control participants. Some mood-incongruent effects were observed where anxious participants were more likely to adopt neutral interpretations of potentially threatening stimuli. Effects were observed in a spelling task (Experiments 1 and 2) and in a lexical decision task (Experiment 3), with supraliminal, and subliminal presentation of contextual cues, and with 2 different anxiety-induction procedures. Results show how anxiety affects both the content and the process of resolution of ambiguity.     

Time course of melody recognition: a gating paradigm study

Recognizing a well-known melody (e.g., one's national anthem) is not an all-or-none process. Instead, recognition develops progressively while the melody unfolds over time. To examine which factors govern the time course of this recognition process, the gating paradigm, initially designed to study auditory word recognition, was adapted to music. Musicians and nonmusicians were presented with segments of increasing duration of familiar and unfamiliar melodies (i.e., the first note, then the first two notes, then the first three notes, and so forth). Recognition was assessed after each segment either by requiring participants to provide a familiarity judgment (Experiment 1) or by asking them to sing the melody that they thought had been presented (Experiment 2). In general, the more familiar the melody, the fewer the notes required for recognition. Musicians judged music's familiarity within fewer notes than did nonmusicians, whereas the reverse situation (i.e., musicians were slower than nonmusicians) occurred when a sung response was requested. However, both musicians and nonmusicians appeared to segment melodies into the same perceptual units (i.e., motives) in order to access the correct representation in memory. These results are interpreted in light of the cohort model (Marslen-Wilson, 1987), as applied to the music domain.     

Commanding the direction of passive whole-body rotations facilitates egocentric spatial updating

In conditions of slow passive transport without vision, even tenuous inertial signals from semi-circular canals and the haptic-kinaesthetic system should provide information about changes relative to the environment provided that it is possible to command the direction of the body's movements voluntarily. Without such control, spatial updating should be impaired because incoming signals cannot be compared to the expected sensory consequences provided by voluntary command. Participants were seated in a rotative robot (Robuter) and learnt the positions of five objects in their surroundings. They were then blindfolded and assigned either to the active group (n=7) or to the passive group (n=7). Members of the active group used a joystick to control the direction of rotation of the robot. The acceleration (25 degrees /s2) and plateau velocity (9 degrees /s) were kept constant. The participants of the passive group experienced the same stimuli passively. After the rotations, the participants had to point to the objects whilst blindfolded. Participants in the active group significantly outperformed the participants in the passive group. Thus, even tenuous inertial cues are useful for spatial updating in the absence of vision, provided that such signals are integrated as feedback associated with intended motor command.     

Toward an Anthropology of Exchange in Tamil Nadu

This article is an attempt to present the cultural conceptions of exchange that appear in studies of medieval South Indian redistributive processes and the anthropology of Tamil caste, kinship, and marital transactions. As such it does not engage theological understandings of gifts to and from South Indian deities. The approach is sociological, and the argument is that whether the mode is redistributive or donative, Tamil exchanges create social relationships that are embedded in meanings of distinction and precedence. What is handed out is a position in a social order that is first and foremost hierarchical, a rank in a social sequence, so that not merely things and services but social distinctions move through the social landscape.     

Strategies included in cognitive behavioral therapy programs to treat internalized disorders: a systematic review

This review aimed to identify the strategies used in programs based on cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to prevent and treat symptoms of anxiety, depression, and internalized behaviors of children and adolescents. Based on an online search (ERIC, PsycInfo, Virtuose UQAM, and Google Scholar), 61 studies describing different cognitive behavioral programs were selected. Results showed that 40 strategies were implemented in at least one program. However, none of the strategies were systematically present in all programs, and only few were reported in more than 50% of the studies. Cognitive restructuring and problem-solving were the most popular strategies to treat depressive symptoms, whereas anxiety programs also generally included relaxation and exposure. Furthermore, six strategies were identified in a single anxiety program, whereas nine strategies were implemented in only one depression program. These results suggest that in anxiety and depression programs designed for children and adolescents, the label “CBT” encompasses a wide variety of programs with only few similar strategies. Such findings highlight the need to define a common basis for CBT programs, in order to better reflect CBT theory and to identify the effectiveness of the strategies included in these programs.     

Do Children Behave Better When Parents’ Emotion Coaching Practices are Stimulated? A Micro-Trial Study

The links between parents’ emotion regulation practices and children’s behavioral outcomes are well established. The aim of the current study designed as a randomized micro-trial was to test experimentally if and to what extent stimulating parents’ emotion coaching practices improves preschoolers’ behavioral outcomes, i.e. positive affect, irritability, non-compliance, persistence and enthusiasm. In line with this objective, the emotion coaching practices of parents of 4-to-5-year-old children were stimulated in a brief 15-min lab session. Immediately afterwards, parents and children were observed during a free-play session and frustration laboratory tasks designed to elicit negative emotions in children. The results indicated that, compared to the control group, parents whose emotion coaching practices had been stimulated displayed higher positive affect and were more emotionally sensitive during free play. Positive behaviors persisted in frustration tasks; parents were more behaviorally and emotionally responsive towards their children. In turn, children of these parents displayed higher persistence and enthusiasm but only when they had to deal with negative emotional arousal during frustration tasks. Mediation analyses also confirmed that the influence of the stimulation of parents’ emotion coaching practices on children’s outcomes, i.e. persistence and enthusiasm, was mediated by the parents’ behavior.