Employment and Family as Determinants of Anticipated Life Satisfaction: Contrasting Young Adults’ and Elderly People’s Viewpoints

The objective of the present study was to examine the relationship between life satisfaction, personal employment, spouse employment, and family responsibilities as perceived by lay people and, in particular, to study the extent to which the additive threshold model evidenced by Macri and Mullet (2002) in a Greek sample of respondents can be generalized to other samples. One hundred young French adults and 100 elderly French people were presented with several vignettes depicting family conditions in terms of the three variables. Their task was to rate each vignette in terms of anticipated life satisfaction. The rule, which best accounted for anticipated satisfaction with life judgments was the hypothesized additive threshold rule. It may be expressed as anticipated satisfaction = proximity to optimal personal employment level + proximity to spouse optimal employment level + proximity to optimal family size, as long as acceptable personal and spouse employment levels are considered. This rule was common to young and elderly participants and largely independent of educational level.     

A Systematic Review of Studies Reporting Data-Driven Cognitive Subtypes across the Psychosis Spectrum

Neuropsychology Review - The delineation of cognitive subtypes of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder may offer a means of determining shared genetic markers and neuropathology among individuals...     

Forgivingness and Satisfaction with Life

The present study was aimed at examining the link between satisfaction with life and forgivingness using a dispositional measurement for forgiveness. The participants were 810 adolescent and adults living in France, and 192 college students living in Portugal. They were presented with the Forgivingness questionnaire (Mullet, E., J. Barros, L. Frongia, V. Usai and F. Neto: 2003, Journal of Personality 71, pp. 1–19), and the Satisfaction With Life Scale (Diener, E., R.J. Emmons, R.J. Larsen and S. Griffin: 1985, Journal of Personality Assessment 49, pp. 71–75). The link between satisfaction with life and all three components of forgivingness (enduring resentment, sensitivity to circumstances, and overall willingness to forgive) was weak, and most of the time non-significant. This result is consistent with previous findings showing that (a) forgiving an offense to an offender does not result in a strong increase in overall satisfaction, and (b) strictly self-referential traits (e.g., self-esteem and loneliness) are typically not linked with forgivingness. Possible reasons why forgivingness and satisfaction with life are not linked are discussed.     

Multisensory integration in multiple reference frames in the posterior parietal cortex

Spatial information processing takes place in different brain regions that receive converging inputs from several sensory modalities. Because of our own movements—for example, changes in eye position, head rotations, and so forth—unimodal sensory representations move continuously relative to one another. It is generally assumed that for multisensory integration to be an orderly process, it should take place between stimuli at congruent spatial locations. In the monkey posterior parietal cortex, the ventral intraparietal (VIP) area is specialized for the analysis of movement information using visual, somatosensory, vestibular, and auditory signals. Focusing on the visual and tactile modalities, we found that in area VIP, like in the superior colliculus, multisensory signals interact at the single neuron level, suggesting that this area participates in multisensory integration. Curiously, VIP does not use a single, invariant coordinate system to encode locations within and across sensory modalities. Visual stimuli can be encoded with respect to the eye, the head, or halfway between the two reference frames, whereas tactile stimuli seem to be prevalently encoded relative to the body. Hence, while some multisensory neurons in VIP could encode spatially congruent tactile and visual stimuli independently of current posture, in other neurons this would not be the case. Future work will need to evaluate the implications of these observations for theories of optimal multisensory integration.Edited by: Marie-Hélène Giard and Mark Wallace     

Delay-dependent involvement of the rat entorhinal cortex in habituation to a novel environment

Evidence has accumulated that the entorhinal cortex (EC) is involved in memory operations underlying formation of a long-term memory. Because entorhinal-lesioned rats are impaired for long delays in delayed matching and non-matching to sample tasks, it has been proposed that EC contributes to the maintenance of information in short-term memory. In the present study, we asked whether such a time-limited role applies also when learning complex spatial information in a novel environment. We therefore examined the effects of EC lesions on habituation in an object exploration task in which a delay of either 4 min or 10 min is imposed between successive sessions. EC-lesioned rats exhibited a deficit in habituation at 10 min but not 4 min delays. Following habituation, reactions to spatial change (object configuration) and non-spatial change (novel object) were also examined. EC-lesioned rats were impaired in detecting the spatial change but were able to detect a non-spatial change, irrespective of the delay. Overall, the results suggest that EC is involved in maintaining a large amount of novel, multidimensional information in short-term memory therefore enabling formation of long-term memory. Switching to a novelty detection mode would then allow the animal to rapidly adapt to environmental changes. In this mode, EC would preferentially process spatial information rather than non-spatial information.     

Effects of Limitations on the Use of Some Visual and Kinaesthetic Information in Spatial Mapping during Exploration in the Rat

The purpose of this experiment was to study the effects of limiting visual and/or locomotor access to a part of the environment in the building up of a spatial representation of the whole space. During five sessions, rats were allowed to explore separately and successively the two halves (subspaces) of a circular open field containing four objects. During exploration of each half, continuous or discontinuous locomotor and/or visual access to the other half was provided by using opaque or transparent partitions, with or without doors. Once habituation was complete, the partition was removed for some subjects but remained for others. The locomotor and exploratory reactions to this removal were recorded. Whatever their locomotor experience (continuous or discontinuous), rats that had a discontinuous visual experience between the subspaces displayed a renewal of exploratory activity, whereas the rats that had received a continuous visual experience did not re-explore the objects. This result suggests that continuous visual access to the whole space is necessary for the construction of an overall representation. Furthermore, continuous locomotor activity does not seem to compensate for the discontinuity of visual information.     

Acceptability in France of Induced Abortion for Adolescents

Background: This study investigated the factors affecting the acceptability in France of abortions. Method: 80 study participants from Toulouse and 124 from Metz judged the acceptability of abortion in 64 vignettes composed of five factors: 1) the adolescent's age (15 or 17.5 years), 2) the adolescent's plans to continue schooling or not, 3) the fetus' age (1, 2, 3, or 4 months), 4) the adolescent's parents' agreement or not, and 5) the agreement or not of baby's father. Results: Three clusters were noted: 1) abortion is never acceptable (8% of participants), 2) abortion is always acceptable (23%), and 3) acceptability of abortion depends on the circumstances (63%). In the majority cluster (3), all five factors had significant effects, but the fetus's age accounted for most of the variance (78%). Conclusion: Most subjects in this study judged, in accordance with French law, that the acceptability of induced abortion in minors depends on the circumstances and, in particular, on the fetus' age.