Twinning projects between immigrant families and quebecois families: Volunteer work,mutual aid,or intervention?

Twinning projects between immigrants and local residents are often analyzed from the viewpoint of intercultural relations or adaptation to the host society. Our concern here is with the domestic processes at work in twinning projects implemented by community organizations and funded by the Ministère des Relations avec les Citoyens et de l'Immigration. This draws from a research project carried out among seventy-five twinned families, half of which are Quebecois and half immigrants of diverse origins. Our analysis centers around the different forms of appropriation open to actors: volunteer work, intervention, and mutual aid.     

The additive and interactive effects of parenting and children's personality on externalizing behaviour

Parenting practices have been previously linked to childhood externalizing behaviour. However, little attention has been given to the potential effect of individual personality differences among children on this relation. The current study assesses the additive effects of children's personality characteristics and explores the moderating effects of children's personality on relations between parenting practices and childhood externalizing behaviour using a proportional stratified sample of 599 nonclinical elementary‐school‐aged children. Multiple regression analyses reveal that in the mother data as well as in the father data, dysfunctional parenting and the children's personality characteristics Benevolence, Conscientiousness, and Extraversion were directly related to outcomes consistent with an additive model of their effects. Significant interactions indicate that children with low scores on Benevolence who were exposed to overreactive discipline practices exhibited higher levels of externalizing behaviour. Children characterized by low scores on Conscientiousness who were exposed to coercive parenting behaviour showed elevated levels of externalizing behaviour. These results suggest that integrating children's personality characteristics within parenting models can improve the understanding of the aetiology of childhood externalizing problem behaviour. The implications of such integrations for intervention are discussed. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Introduction

This introduction presents the extension of Freud's instinct theory via Kohut's theory of narcissism and the self to an application of the combined theories to the political group violence racking the world scene.     

Reduced fixation on the upper area of personally familiar faces following acquired prosopagnosia

Selective impairment of face recognition following brain damage, as in acquired prosopagnosia, may cause a dramatic loss of diagnosticity of the eye area of the face and an increased reliance on the mouth for identification ( Caldara et al., 2005 ). To clarify the nature of this phenomenon, we measured eye fixation patterns in a case of pure prosopagnosia (PS, Rossion et al., 2003 ) during her identification of photographs of personally familiar faces (27 children of her kindergarten). Her age‐matched colleague served as a control. Consistent with previous evidence, the normal control identified the faces within two fixations located just below the eyes (central upper nose). This pattern (location and duration) of fixations remained unchanged even by increasing difficulty by presenting anti‐caricatures of the faces. In contrast, the great majority of the patient's fixations, irrespective of her accuracy, were located on the mouth. Overall, these observations confirm the abnormally reduced processing of the upper area of the face in acquired prosopagnosia. Most importantly, the prosopagnosic patient also fixated the area of the eyes spontaneously in between the first and last fixation, ruling out alternative accounts of her behaviour such as, for example, avoidance or failure to orient attention to the eyes, as observed in autistic or bilateral amygdala patients. Rather, they reinforce our proposal of a high‐level perceptual account ( Caldara et al., 2005 ), according to which acquired prosopagnosic patients have lost the ability to represent multiple elements of an individual face as a perceptual unit (holistic face perception). To identify a given face, they focus very precisely on local features rather than seeing the whole of a face from its diagnostic centre (i.e. just below the eyes). The upper area of the face is particularly less attended to and less relevant for the prosopagnosic patient because it contains multiple features that require normal holistic perception in order to be the most diagnostic region. Consequently, prosopagnosic patients develop a more robust representation of the mouth, a relatively isolated feature in the face that may contain more information than any single element of the upper face area, and is thus sampled repeatedly for resolving ambiguity in the process of identification.     

Self-reported adjustment of teenagers at soccer training centers: the Soccer Trainee Adjustment Scale

The aim of this study was to develop a questionnaire to measure adjustment of teenagers at soccer training centers, particularly newcomers. The Soccer Trainee Adjustment Scale was adapted from the Institutional Integration Scale and assesses the trainee's adjustment to operating and social activities. The scale was tested on a sample of 136 trainees from four soccer centers. Exploratory analysis indicated that the 13 items formed five factors: peer adjustment, boarding supervisor adjustment, soccer adjustment, scholastic adjustment, and boarding adjustment. These factors had internal consistency reliability ranging from .76 to .94.     

Wavelet modelling of collinearity judgment error

Prior research has found that participants manifest complex profiles of error when they are asked to judge collinearity of stimulus elements. These studies used harmonic analysis to model the data, and found large departures from accurate collinear judgments, with the amplitude and specific angular position of departures from valid judgment varying from one participant to the next. The models appeared to be a composite of many large‐, medium‐ and small‐scale departures, but this could not be established with any certainty because of the global nature of harmonic model components. Wavelet modelling is better suited to answer the question of whether the error profile is produced by independent sources that vary in size and location. Here, we examined judgments of collinearity of dot pairs across 360° of angular position. A priori and post hoc wavelet modelling strategies were used to identify independent sources of error that could not be attributed to chance, and some new statistical protocols were applied. We found evidence of error sources at several levels of scale, and these results were confirmed by the application of cross‐validation methods that make no assumption about the nature of the error probability distribution.     

Gender and education impact on brain aging: a general cognitive factor approach

In cognitive aging research, the study of a general cognitive factor has been shown to have a substantial explanatory power over the study of isolated tests. The authors aimed at differentiating the impact of gender and education on global cognitive change with age from their differential impact on 4 psychometric tests using a new latent process approach, which intermediates between a single-factor longitudinal model for sum scores and an item-response theory approach for longitudinal data. The analysis was conducted on a sample of 2,228 subjects from PAQUID, a population-based cohort of older adults followed for 13 years with repeated measures of cognition. Adjusted for vascular factors, the analysis confirmed that women performed better in tests involving verbal components, while men performed better in tests involving visuospatial skills. In addition, the model suggested that women had a slightly steeper global cognitive decline with oldest age than men, even after excluding incident dementia or death. Subjects with higher education exhibited a better mean score for the 4 tests, but this difference tended to attenuate with age for tests involving a speed component.     

The temporal dynamics of consolidation and reconsolidation decrease during postnatal development

The temporal dynamics of consolidation and reconsolidation of taste/odor aversion memory are evaluated during rat pup growth at postnatal days 3, 10, and 18. This is assessed through the temporal gradients of efficacy of a protein synthesis inhibitor (anisomycin) in inducing amnesia after either acquisition (consolidation) or reactivation (reconsolidation). The results show a progressive reduction with age of the delay during which the inhibitor is able to induce amnesia. Control experiments rule out a reduction of anisomycin efficacy due to blood brain barrier growth or decrease in protein synthesis inhibition. Thus, these results present the first evidence that the protein synthesis-dependent phase of memory stabilization requires less time with age. This decrease occurs in parallel for consolidation and reconsolidation. Such changes in the dynamics of memory processing could contribute to the cognitive improvement associated with development.     

Links between parental psychological violence, other family disturbances, and children's adjustment

In a sample of 143 parent-child dyads from two-parent and separated families, this investigation documented the links between parental psychological violence and separation or divorce, severity of parental conflict, triangulation of the child in this conflict, and polarized parent-child alliances. The unique and combined contributions of all these variables to children's behavior problems were also assessed. Participants were parents, mostly mothers, and their 10-12-year-old child. They were recruited through schools, community organizations, and newspapers. Questionnaires were administered at home. Findings suggest that separated families undergo more relational disturbances than two-parent families (more severe conflicts, more triangulation, stronger parent-child alliances), but the amount of parental psychological violence was similar in both groups. Psychological violence was associated with the severity of parental conflict, especially in two-parent families. Triangulation of the child in parental conflict was another correlate of psychological violence. Once all variables were controlled for, psychological violence remained the only significant correlate of children's externalized behavior problems. These findings raise the importance of preventing psychological violence toward children, especially in families plagued with severe parental conflicts.