A novel,short and easy-to-perform method to evaluate newborns’ social olfactory preferences

Animal Cognition - Humans’ early olfactory perception has been studied mainly within the framework of mother–offspring interactions and only a few studies have focused on...     

La socialisation des émotions chez le nourrisson: le rôle des expressions faciales contingentes des mères

Although maternal contingent responses to their infant's facial expressions of emotions is thought to play an important role in the socialization of emotions, available data are still scarce and often inconsistent To further investigate how mothers' contingent facial expressions might influence infant emotional development, we undertook to study mother‐infant dyads in four episodes of face‐to‐face interaction during the first year. Mothers' facial expressions were strongly related to their infant's facial expressions of emotions, most of their contingent responses being produced within one second following infants' facial expressions Specific patterns of responses were also found. The impact of maternal contingent responding on infants' expressive development was also examined.     

Acquisition and use of spelling-sound correspondences in reading

The acquisition and use of knowledge concerning the spelling-sound correspondences of English were evaluated by having children read words and nonwords that contained regular and homographic spelling patterns. Regular spelling patterns are associated with a single pronunciation (e.g., -UST as in MUST); homographic patterns have multiple pronunciations (e.g., -OSE as in HOSE, DOSE, LOSE). Analyses of errors, latencies, and pronunciations provided evidence for two complementary developmental processes: good beginning readers rapidly learn to recognize high-frequency words from visual input alone, while at the same time they are expanding and consolidating their knowledge of spelling-sound correspondences. Younger and poor readers rely more on phonological information in word decoding, as evidenced by their particular difficulty reading homographic spelling patterns. Poor readers do not appear to use a radically different strategy for reading words: their perfomance is similar to that of younger, good readers.     

Responding to allegations of scientific misconduct

Institutions in France are not yet well prepared to respond to allegations of scientific misconduct. Following a serious allegation in late 1997. INSERM,* the primary organization for medical and health-related research in France, began to reflect on this subject, aided by scientists and jurists. The conclusions have resulted in establishing a procedure to be followed in cases of alleged misconduct, and also in reinforcing the application of good laboratory practices within each laboratory. Guidelines for authorship practices and scientific assessment must also be considered. Even though each institution must remain responsible for responding to allegations of scientific misconduct within its doors, INSERM would like to see national, European, and international co-ordination about the methods of such response. Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (eng. French National Medical Research Institute) is known as INSERM. An earlier version of this paper was presented at a symposium, Scientific Misconduct: An International Perspective, organised by The Medical University of Warsaw, 16 November, 1998.     

The relationship of interparental conflict and global marital adjustment to aggression,anxiety, and immaturity in aggressive and nonclinic children

Although there is agreement that marital problems are associated either directly or indirectly with particular child behavior problems, there is disagreement about the types of marital conflict associated with these problems and the differential effects on boys and girls in clinic and nonclinic samples. We examined the relationships among mothers' ratings of marital adjustment, parenting disagreements, and three child problem factors (aggression, anxiety, and immaturity) after the child's age and family socioeconomic status were controlled. These relationships were compared with samples of boys and girls (3 to 8 years of age) from clinic and nonclinic populations, revealing that parenting disagreement predicted aggression in all groups and that both marital adjustment and parenting disagreement predicted anxiety in boys. Neither marital variable predicted immaturity. Possible reasons for the results (including methodological limitations of the present data) are discussed.Thanks to Merryl Reville and Kath Faulkner, Monica Smith and Dr. Bill Bor of Queensland Division of Child Guidance, and Pat Roberts of the Lady Gowrie Child Centre for their help with subject recruitment. Part of this study was supported by a Social Science Research Grant from the University of Queensland.     

Behavioral correlates of self-control at 33 months

Self-control behavior of 48 33-month-old children was examined during two delay-of-gratification tasks. Children were categorized as high, medium, and low in self-control on the basis of their cumulative delay time. Instances of attention shifts, body movements, as well as social and object-referencing were coded throughout the two delay periods. Results showed significant group differences in behavioral tactics. Children in the low group looked at and touched the forbidden object more often; members of the medium group used more social referencing, and those in the high group were more likely to reference nonforbidden objects. Findings also suggested that high controllers were more likely to use self-distraction tactics involving shifts in attention from one object to another during the delay period. Separate analyses for each task indicated that the observed delay tactics were stable from one context to the other. These findings substantiate results from other research on self-control with 3-year-old children and also document different behavioral styles of self-regulation during delay of gratification.     

Dysexecutive syndrome in Parkinson’s disease: the GREFEX study

The objectives of this study were to characterize the frequencies and profiles of behavioral and cognitive dysexecutive syndromes in PD (based on validated battery and diagnostic criteria) and to develop a shortened diagnostic battery. Eighty-eight non-demented patients with a diagnosis of PD were examined with an executive validated battery. Using a validated framework, the patients’ test results were interpreted with respect to normative data from 780 controls. A dysexecutive syndrome was observed in 80.6% of the patients [95% confidence interval: 71.1–90.1]. The dysexecutive profile was characterized by prominent impairments in deduction, flexibility, inhibition and initiation in the cognitive domain, and by global hypoactivity with apathy and hyperactivity in the behavioral domain. This finding implies that patients with PD should be assessed with cognitive tests and a validated inventory for behavioral dysexecutive syndromes. A shortened battery (based on three cognitive tests and three behavioral domains) provided high diagnostic accuracy.