DEGRÉ DE CONTACT ET STRESS ACCULTURATIF DANS LE PROCESSUS D'ADAPTATION DES RÉFUGIÉS AFRICAINS

This study examines some aspects of the adaptive process of African refugees taking up residence in Quebec city, a rather culturally homogenous area. Considering that acculturative stress and degree of contact and participation with the host society are strong indicators of one's adjustment to a new culture, the main hypothesis is that the more contact and participation one establishes with the host society, the less acculturative stress he will report. Out of 62 subjects who voluntarily accepted to participate in the study, 57 were retained for analysis. Results reveal no significant relationship between stress and contact. Multiple regression analyses used to determine the significant predictor variables indicate that age and length of stay explain 19.5% of the total variance for stress while length of stay, sex and adaptive options explain 44% of the total variance for contact. These results tend to demonstrate that, for African refugees, degree of contact is a better indicator of adaptation than stress.     

Synchrony and emotion in children and adults

This study examined both the development of synchronisation activities and the way emotion affects these activities in children and adults. Children aged from 3 to 8 years, as well as adults, performed a spontaneous motor tempo (SMT) task and a synchronisation task with a 500‐millisecond and 700‐millisecond inter‐stimulus interval (ISI), followed by a continuation task, in both an emotion‐free and an emotional context (High‐Arousal, Low‐Arousal, and Neutral). The results showed that the SMT was faster and more variable in the younger children. In addition, the younger children found it more difficult to slow down their tapping rate in synchrony with the 700‐millisecond ISI, with the result that they quickly returned to their internal tempo in the continuation phase. In contrast, the 8‐year‐olds' synchronisation performance was close to that of the adults. However, despite developmental changes in synchronisation skills, all the participants produced faster tempi in both the SMT and the synchronisation task for the High‐Arousal emotion than for the other emotions. This suggests that emotions induce an automatic distortion of motor timing as has also been observed for the perception of time.     

African American Adolescent-Caregiver Relationships in a Weight Loss Trial

Successful family-based weight loss interventions for African American adolescents are rare. Parent-adolescent interactions supporting adoption of healthier nutrition and physical activity practices are not well understood. African American caregivers' and adolescents' perspectives on how they worked together to achieve weight loss need further exploration. This study describes the relationships experienced by adolescents and caregivers during the 6-month, evidence-based FIT Families weight loss trial and explores differences between families whose adolescents were successful and unsuccessful with weight loss. Exit interviews conducted with 136 adolescents (age 12–16 years; BMI percentile ≥95) and their caregivers (primarily mothers) were taped and transcribed verbatim. Content and thematic analysis was conducted to explore differences between groups stratified by weight loss. Five adolescent-caregiver relationship patterns emerged which describe dyads working together, working alone, working against each other; caregiver support and caregiver working on self. When relationship patterns were compared between groups stratified by weight loss, three themes emerged: motivation, support, and persistence. Families that achieved the greatest weight loss referred more often to working together to reach weight loss goals, attributed their success to adolescent self-motivation, with engaged caregiver support which allowed families to persist in change efforts. Family relationships involving adolescent autonomy, engaged parental support, and persistence despite challenges, clustered differently among adolescents who were successful at weight loss compared to those who were not. Interventionists trained to reinforce effective adolescent-parent interactions will advance behavioral interventions for families who have typically benefited least in prior interventions.     

Brain mechanisms involved in angry prosody change detection in school-age children and adults,revealed by electrophysiology

Voices transmit social signals through speech and/or prosody. Emotional prosody conveys key information about the emotional state of a speaker and is thus a crucial cue that one has to detect in order to develop efficient social communication. Previous studies in adults reported different brain responses to emotional than to neutral prosodic deviancy. The aim of this study was to characterize such specific emotional deviancy effects in school-age children. The mismatch negativity (MMN) and P3a evoked potentials, reflecting automatic change detection and automatic attention orienting, respectively, were obtained for neutral and emotional angry deviants in both school-age children (n = 26) and adults (n = 14). Shorter latencies were found for emotional than for neutral preattentional responses in both groups. However, whereas this effect was observed on the MMN in adults, it appeared in an early discriminative negativity preceding the MMN in children. A smaller P3a amplitude was observed for the emotional than for the neutral deviants at all ages. Overall, the brain responses involved in specific emotional change processing are already present during childhood, but responses have not yet reached an adult pattern. We suggest that these processing differences might contribute to the known improvement of emotional prosody perception between childhood and adulthood.     

Use of the Hayling task to measure inhibition of prepotent responses in normal aging and Alzheimer's disease

This study measures the effect of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and normal aging on the inhibition of prepotent responses. AD patients, normal aged controls, and young subjects were tested with the Hayling task, which measures the ability to inhibit a semantically constrained response, and with the Stroop procedure. AD patients showed a severe deficit in both error rates and response time on the Hayling task. Inhibition was also impaired on the Stroop procedure, both when using raw performance and when using an inhibition score that controlled for reading and naming speed. Normal aged participants showed modest impairment relative to young controls on both tests. Examination of individual performance in AD patients indicated that the impairment was found in most patients on the Hayling test but in only a subgroup of patients on the Stroop test.     

Perinatal maternal undernutrition programs the offspring hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis

There is now compelling evidence, coming both from animal and human studies that an early exposure to undernutrition is frequently associated with low birth weight and programs HPA axis alterations throughout the lifespan. Although animal models have reported conflicting findings arising from differences in experimental paradigms and species, they have clearly demonstrated that such programming not only affects the brain but also the pituitary corticotrophs and the adrenal cortex. In fetuses, maternal undernutrition reduces HPA axis function and implicates a reduction of placental 11beta-HSD2 activity and a greater transplacental transfer of glucocorticoids (GRs). In young adults, usually only fine HPA axis alterations were observed, whereas in older ones, maternal undernutrition was frequently associated with chronic hyperactivity of this neuroendocrine axis. In humans, evidence of HPA axis dysregulation in people who were small at birth has recently emerged. Thus, we suggest that such alterations in adults may be implicated in the aetiology of several disorders related to the metabolic syndrome as well as to immune or inflammatory diseases. To reverse such programming, recent experimental reports have shown that postnatal environmental interventions, dietary modifications and the use of agents modulating the epigenomic state could partly restore physiological functions and thus open new therapeutic strategies.     

Mere exposure effect: A consequence of direct and indirect fluency-preference links

In three experiments, picture quality between test items was manipulated to examine whether subjects' expectations about the fluency normally associated with these different stimuli might influence the effects of fluency on preference or familiarity-based recognition responses. The results showed that fluency due to pre-exposure influenced responses less when objects were presented with high picture quality, suggesting that attributions of fluency to preference and familiarity are adjusted according to expectations about the different test pictures. However, this expectations influence depended on subjects' awareness of these different quality levels. Indeed, imperceptible differences seemed not to induce expectations about the test item fluency. In this context, fluency due to both picture quality and pre-exposure influenced direct responses. Conversely, obvious, and noticed, differences in test picture quality did no affect responses, suggesting that expectations moderated attributions of fluency only when fluency normally associated with these different stimuli was perceptible but difficult to assess.     

Executive functioning in normal aging: a study of action planning using the Zoo Map Test

A particularly important aspect of executive functioning involves the ability to form and carry out complex plans, that is to say planning. This study aimed to investigate planning in 18 older and 16 younger normal participants using an ecological planning subtask derived from the Behavioural Assessment of the Dysexecutive Syndrome test battery, the "Zoo Map Test." There are two trials. The first trial consists of a "high demand" version of the subtask in which the participants must plan in advance the order in which they will visit designated locations in a zoo (formulation level). In the second, or "low demand" version, the participant is simply required to follow a concrete externally imposed strategy to reach the locations to visit (execution level). The two-way ANOVAs mainly showed more difficulties in elderly adults than in younger adults, more difficulties in formulation level than in execution level, and lastly a greater difference between formulation and execution in older participants than in younger adults. These results suggest that elderly participants have some problems developing logical strategies whereas they are able to execute complex predetermined plans.     

Psycholinguistic norms for action photographs in French and their relationships with spoken and written latencies

A set of 142 photographs of actions (taken from Fiez & Tranel, 1997) was standardized in French on name agreement, image agreement, conceptual familiarity, visual complexity, imageability, age of acquisition, and duration of the depicted actions. Objective word frequency measures were provided for the infinitive modal forms of the verbs and for the cumulative frequency of the verbal forms associated with the photographs. Statistics on the variables collected for action items were provided and compared with the statistics on the same variables collected for object items. The relationships between these variables were analyzed, and certain comparisons between the current database and other similar published databases of pictures of actions are reported. Spoken and written naming latencies were also collected for the photographs of actions, and multiple regression analyses revealed that name agreement, image agreement, and age of acquisition are the major determinants of action naming speed. Finally, certain analyses were performed to compare object and action naming times. The norms and the spoken and written naming latencies corresponding to the pictures are available on the Internet (http://www.psy.univ-bpclermont.fr/~pbonin/pbonin-eng.html) and should be of great use to researchers interested in the processing of actions.