Temperament and Character Inventory - Revised (TCI-R) 1 year after the earthquake of L’Aquila (Italy)

The aim of this pilot study was to evaluate the impact of L’Aquila earthquake (Italy) on the Temperament and Character Inventory - Revised (TCI-R) administered 1 year after the earthquake to a community sample of 375 subjects exposed to the earthquake and 480 non-exposed. Exposed people showed variations in the adaptive response to stress with higher Persistence (P) and lower Harm Avoidance (HA) dimensions among adult and lower self directedness (SD) and higher Harm Avoidance (HA) in older people. No differences in young adults were seen. Temperament and character dimensions are sensitive to trauma exposure in different ways in different age groups.     

Developing motor planning over ages

Few studies have explored the development of response selection processes in children in the case of object manipulation. In the current research, we studied the end-state comfort effect, the tendency to ensure a comfortable position at the end rather than at the beginning of simple object manipulation tasks. We used two versions of the unimanual bar transport task. In Experiment 1, only 10-year-olds reached the same level of sensitivity to end-state comfort as adults, and 8-year-olds were less efficient than 6-year-olds. In each age group, children’s sensitivity did not increase during a session: i.e., either clearly showed the sensitivity or showed no sensitivity at all. Experiment 2 replicated these results when the bar was replaced by a pencil and when the task did not require much precision. However, when the task required more precision, 8-year-olds increased their level of sensitivity to the end-state comfort effect, whereas this was not the case for younger children. These results describe the development of advanced planning processes from 4 to 10 years of age as well as the positive effect of task constraints on the end-state comfort effect for 8-year-olds.     

The development of analogy making in children: Cognitive load and executive functions

The aim of the current study was to investigate the performance of 6-, 8-, and 14-year-olds on an analogy-making task involving analogies in which there are competing perceptual and relational matches. We hypothesized that the selection of the common relational structure requires the inhibition of other salient features, in particular, perceptual matches. Using an A:B::C:D paradigm, we showed that children’s performance in analogy-making tasks depends crucially on the nature of the distractors. Children chose more perceptual distractors having a common feature with C compared with A or B (Experiment 1). In addition, they were also influenced by unstructured random textures. When measuring reaction times instead of accurate responses, only the 8-year-olds’ reaction times were significantly influenced by perceptual distractors. The 6-year-olds seemed to select the first match they noticed, and the 14-year-olds were not influenced (or much less influenced) by featural distractors. These results are compatible with an analogy-making account based on varying limitations in executive functioning at different ages.     

Improving Attitudes Toward Prostate Examinations by Loss-Framed Appeals

One of the main causes of late diagnoses in prostate cancer is the aversive attitude toward prostate examinations. In this study, we analyze the efficacy of an informative pamphlet in changing that attitude. A randomized sample of north Italian men was given different versions of an informative pamphlet, obtained by systematically manipulating the message framing and emotional vividness. After reading the pamphlet, each participant completed an attitude questionnaire. Levels of anxiety and self-reported health status were measured using the STAI-X2 and the SF-36 questionnaires. Results show that loss-framed messages (i.e., messages highlighting the negative consequences of not doing the examinations) had a significant positive effect on attitudes toward the prostate screening, but the effect was rather small.     

Consequences of brain tumour resection on emotion recognition

Emotion processing impairments are common in patients undergoing brain surgery for fronto-temporal tumour resection, with potential consequences on social interactions. However, evidence is controversial concerning side and site of lesions causing such deficits. This study investigates visual and auditory emotion recognition in brain tumour patients with the aim of clarifying which lesion sites are related to impairments in emotion processing from different modalities. Thirty-four patients were evaluated, before and after surgery, on facial expression and emotional prosody recognition; voxel-based lesion–symptom mapping (VLSM) analyses were performed on patients’ post-surgery MRI images. Results showed that patients’ performance decreased after surgery in both visual and auditory modalities, but, in general, recovered 3 months after surgery. In facial expression recognition, left brain-damaged patients showed greater post-surgery deterioration than right brain-damaged ones, whose performance specifically decreased for sadness and fear. VLSM analysis revealed two segregated areas in the left hemisphere accounting for post-surgery scores for happy (fronto-temporo-insular region) and surprised (middle frontal gyrus and inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus) facial expressions. Our findings demonstrate that surgical removal of tumours in the fronto-temporal region produces impairment in facial emotion recognition with an overall recovery at 3 months, suggesting a partially different representation of positive and negative emotions in the left and right hemispheres for visually – but not auditory – presented emotions; moreover, we show that deficits in specific expression recognition are associated with discrete lesion locations.     

Caregiver burden and family functioning in different neurological diseases

Aim of this study is to examine caregiver burden and family functioning in different neurological conditions. Forty-two primary caregivers of patients with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), Alzheimer’s Disease and other dementia (AD), Parkinson’s Disease (PD), Acquired Brain Injuries (ABI) and Multiple Sclerosis (MS) were administered scales for the evaluation of caregiver burden (CBI) and family functioning (FACES IV). Caregiver burden was overall high, with caregivers of patients with ALS and ABI having exceeded the CBI cut-off score for possible burn-out. The average scores of caregivers of patients with AD or other dementia and PD were close to the cut-off score, whereas those of caregivers of patients with MS were significantly lower than the others. Family cohesion, family satisfaction and the quality of family communication were associated with reduced levels of caregiver burden, whereas disengagement was associated with a higher burden. The data from the present study confirm that caregiver burden is a relevant issue in the context of neurological diseases, especially for those causing higher degrees of impairment. Significant correlations with family functioning emerged as well, highlighting the importance of studying and treating caregiver burden within the context of family relations.     

Scoring the DSM-IV personality disorders using the Five-Factor Model: development and validation of normative scores for North American, French, and Dutch-Flemish samples

Five-Factor Model (FFM) personality disorder (PD) counts have demonstrated significant convergent and discriminant validity with DSM-IV PD symptoms. However, these FFM PD counts are of limited clinical use without normative data because it is difficult to determine what a specific score means with regard to the relative level of elevation. The current study presents data from three large normative samples that can be used as norms for the FFM PD counts in the respective countries: United States (N = 1,000), France (N = 801), and Belgium-Netherlands (N = 549). The present study also examines the performance, with regard to diagnostic efficiency, of statistically-defined cut-offs at 1.5 standard deviations above the mean (T > or = 65) versus previously identified cut-offs using receiver-operator characteristics (ROC) analyses. These cut-offs are tested in three clinical samples-one from each of the aforementioned countries. In general, the T > or = 65 cut-offs performed similarly to those identified using ROC analyses and manifested properties relevant to a screening instrument. These normative data allow FFM data to be used in a flexible and comprehensive manner, which may include scoring this type of personality data in order to screen for DSM-IV PD constructs.     

Different athletes cope differently during a sport competition: a cluster analysis of coping

This study aimed at examining the ways in which different athletes may combine the use of several coping strategies and at testing whether perceived goal attainment, affective states, and experience of control would differ across distinctive profiles of coping. A sample of 151 French-Canadian athletes out of 200 who were approached by a research assistant completed l’Inventaire des Strat gies de Coping en Comp tition Sportive (Gaudreau & Blondin, 2002a), the PANAS ( Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988), and a series of items measuring experience of control and perceived goal attainment. Results of a cluster analysis indicated that athletes could be classified in four groups according to their in-competition use of coping strategies. After controlling for athletes’ self-referenced goal attainment, their experience of control, positive affective state, and anger-dejection state differed significantly (p<0.008) across the four profiles of coping. Athletes who have used high level of task-oriented coping in combination with low level of disengagement-oriented coping reported better goal and psychological adjustment than athletes who have used high level of disengagement-oriented coping in combination with low level of task-oriented coping. Overall, these findings suggested that research should move from coping strategies to coping profiles in order to provide a deeper understanding of how different individuals cope with stress.     

Life designing: A paradigm for career construction in the 21st century

At the beginning of the 21st century, a new social arrangement of work poses a series of questions and challenges to scholars who aim to help people develop their working lives. Given the globalization of career counseling, we decided to address these issues and then to formulate potentially innovative responses in an international forum. We used this approach to avoid the difficulties of creating models and methods in one country and then trying to export them to other countries where they would be adapted for use. This article presents the initial outcome of this collaboration, a counseling model and methods. The life-designing model for career intervention endorses five presuppositions about people and their work lives: contextual possibilities, dynamic processes, non-linear progression, multiple perspectives, and personal patterns. Thinking from these five presuppositions, we have crafted a contextualized model based on the epistemology of social constructionism, particularly recognizing that an individual’s knowledge and identity are the product of social interaction and that meaning is co-constructed through discourse. The life-design framework for counseling implements the theories of self-constructing [Guichard, J. (2005). Life-long self-construction. International Journal for Educational and Vocational Guidance, 5, 111–124] and career construction [Savickas, M. L. (2005). The theory and practice of career construction. In S. D. Brown & R. W. Lent (Eds.), Career development and counselling: putting theory and research to work (pp. 42–70). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley] that describe vocational behavior and its development. Thus, the framework is structured to be life-long, holistic, contextual, and preventive.