Multi-family groups in the treatment of young adults with eating disorders

Multi-family group therapy is a variant of family therapy in which members are able to gain insight and learn from each other, provide support and encouragement, alleviate their sense of isolation and improve communication and social functioning. This study describes a series of multi-family groups conducted within the eating disorder service of a large London NHS Hospital. Ratings made by participants indicated that families viewed the treatment favourably.     

Analysis of the creation of 'emptiness', of 'nothingness', in certain types of psychosis

Some psychotic patients manage to create nothingness and emptiness thanks to the amount of work their ego accomplishes. That is the paradox we find in schizophrenic patients, their ego is simultaneously weak and powerful. When we analyse how this nothingness/emptiness is created, we enter into a strange world in which the patient's ego is, in part, defective and fragmented; his or her thinking apparatus, capacity for perceiving and feeling are under attack. Yet this same ego can call on intellectual ability, imagination and tremendous energy in order to create a highly complex structure, thanks to which the psychotic individual manages to create a kind of para-organization of space by splitting 'nothingness' (the space between representations) and 'density' (a compact magma made up of many different highly-condensed representations). Both nothingness and density may give the impression that the patient is 'nowhere to be found' and therefore impossible to analyse. In this paper, I shall describe these mechanisms as they appear in the clinical material of a female psychotic patient.     

Tutorials in Domain-specific Acquisition

Recent proposals in cognitive psychology allow us to question the view that learning consists essentially of constructing major general functions applicable in all situations and to grant some new validity to a “domain-specific” conception. This perspective is tested in an experimental study with 5; 5-year-old children. We show that their general knowledge about visuospatial relations are ineffective in the reading domain as long as they have not constructed the knowledge that, for letters (especially symmetrical letters p , b , q , and d ), a change in orientation that does not modify the identity of other objects, does affect the identity of the letters. The specific learning tutorial we proposed to our experimental subjects helped them to acquire the fact that the orientation of symmetrical letters is a distinctive and relevant feature in the reading domain.     

Nature des représentations du langage écrit aux débuts de l'apprentissage de la lecture: un modèle interprétatif

The main objective of this study is to test a knowledge-based simulation model, elaborated in a previous longitudinal research in order to explain reading errors produced by first-grade children. This model relies on two assumptions: (1) in the beginning of the grapho-phonological acquisition, the child tries to extract, from the series of letters which forms a word, graphic patterns corresponding to an oral syllable; (2) these patterns are stored either in an ordered representation or in a non-ordered representation. Permutation errors, often pointed out in this phase of reading acquisition, would then be the mark of a non-ordered representation of the graphic patterns. Two experiments were proposed to new first-grade children, in the middle of the school year. In experiment 1, they had to detect an oral syllable in written pseudo-words in which the first trigram did or did not correspond to the legal order. In experiment 2, they had to read aloud trisyllabic pseudo-words in which the first trigram was presented in four different orders. Reading errors correspond to the predictions our model allows. Moreover, the absence of correlation between the two tasks suggests that the knowledge activated depends on the type of activity.     

Reconstruction de l'histoire personnelle: succession d'événements dans le temps et changements identitaires passés

Comment la place relative de deux types d'événements de vie (EV) influence-telle la reconstruction des changements personnels passés? Cent soixante adultes (21–38 ans) produisent des événements saillants relatifs aux aspects public et privé de leur vie personnelle. Une semaine plus tard, ils estiment l'ampleur et l'orientation des changements associés à ces EV sur 9 dimensions de l'identité. Quatre groupes de sujets sont isolés en fonction de la place occupée par 2 types d'EV (critiques (C) et non critiques (NC)) au cours de 2 périodes consécutives (13–18 ans et 18–23 ans): pour 2 groupes, il y a répétition du même type d'EV (C-C et NC-NC) et pour les deux autres, des ordres différents (C-NC et NC-C). L'hypothèse est que la reconstruction de l'impact d'un EV passé résulte de l'influence conjointe des cadres de référence présent et passé. Les différences entre les 2 types d'EV contrastés montrent la permanence du codage initial de la tonalité associée aux EV. Les différences entre séquences avec répétition sont cohérentes avec l'idée du pouvoir assimilateur du cadre de référence présent; celles entre séquences avec ordres différents illustrent que le travail de reconstruction au présent intègre des éléments conservés en mémoire.     

Conceptual priming for realistic auditory scenes and for auditory words

Two experiments were conducted using both behavioral and Event-Related brain Potentials methods to examine conceptual priming effects for realistic auditory scenes and for auditory words. Prime and target sounds were presented in four stimulus combinations: Sound–Sound, Word–Sound, Sound–Word and Word–Word. Within each combination, targets were conceptually related to the prime, unrelated or ambiguous. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to judge whether the primes and targets fit together (explicit task) and in Experiment 2 they had to decide whether the target was typical or ambiguous (implicit task). In both experiments and in the four stimulus combinations, reaction times and/or error rates were longer/higher and the N400 component was larger to ambiguous targets than to conceptually related targets, thereby pointing to a common conceptual system for processing auditory scenes and linguistic stimuli in both explicit and implicit tasks. However, fine-grained analyses also revealed some differences between experiments and conditions in scalp topography and duration of the priming effects possibly reflecting differences in the integration of perceptual and cognitive attributes of linguistic and nonlinguistic sounds. These results have clear implications for the building-up of virtual environments that need to convey meaning without words.     

Emotional prosody: sex differences in sensitivity to speech melody

Emotional prosody is defined as the ability to express emotions through variations of different parameters of the human speech, such as pitch contour, intensity and duration. A recent study has discovered clear differences between men and women in the time course of emotional prosodic processing. There are several interpretations of these intriguing results that hold promise for future studies on language comprehension.     

Trust in organismic development, autonomy support, and adaptation among mothers and their children

The current studies examined relations between mothers’ trust in organismic development, autonomy supportive parenting, and adaptation among mothers and their young children. Study 1 showed that trust in organismic development was distinct from optimism, neuroticism, and social desirability whereas it correlated with having relaxed expectations for developmental milestones and making fewer social comparisons about one’s child. Study 2 used observational methods to demonstrate a significant link between trust in organismic development and mothers behaving in an autonomy-supportive rather than controlling manner toward their 1-year-old child during puzzle solving activities. Study 3 used a 1 year prospective design to show that trust in first time mothers was associated with better maternal and child adaptation over time, controlling for initial levels of adaptation and child temperament. Study 4 explored possible social/political antecedents of trust in organismic development by comparing the beliefs of first time mothers from Canada and Norway. The four studies suggest that trust in organismic development fosters autonomy supportive parenting practices and positive maternal and child adaptation. These findings are discussed from the perspective of self-determination theory.

Lay counselors: Thoughts on the crossing of ecological frameworks and the use of lay counselors in the scale up of early infant mental health interventions

The recent call for the scale-up of evidence-based early childhood development interventions, in lower and middle-income countries and for minority groups in high-income countries, has seen numerous suggestions to train greater numbers of lay mental health workers to fulfill these functions. While studies have found that concepts from developed country settings, such as attachment, parental sensitivity, and containment, find purchase and relevance within developing settings, the management of contextual and cultural factors and the tensions of cultural interfacing in the rollout of these programs in developing country settings require consideration. Drawing on the experiences of two successful South African mother–infant home-visiting programs as examples, this article discusses some of the challenges in provision of attachment-based infant mental health programs and highlights the need for careful consideration of a number of factors pertaining to the recruitment, supervision, and management of lay mental health workers before large-scale rollout is conducted.     

Adults' age-related differences in adaptivity of strategy choices: evidence from computational estimation

Four experiments document adults' age-related changes in computational estimation performance and in adaptivity of strategy choices (i.e., the ability to choose the most precise strategy on each trial). Young and older adults were asked to provide estimates of 2-by-2-digit multiplication problems (e.g., 43 x 78) under varying conditions of speed and accuracy emphasis. The main findings showed that (a) older adults provided less accurate estimates and took more time to estimate, especially on the most difficult problems or when using harder strategies; (b) young and older adults had similar strategy preferences; and (c) older adults chose estimation strategies less adaptively than young adults. Implications of these findings for understanding strategic changes during adulthood in a wide variety of cognitive domains are discussed.