Étude des représentations sociales toulousaines relatives à la qualité de l’accueil extrafamilial de la toute petite enfance

The eco-systemic model of quality (Bigras & Japel, 2007; Lemay & Bigras, 2012), suggests that it is essential to take into consideration the cultural context (the macro-system) in investigating the quality of early daycare services and developmental outcomes. In order to understand specific cultural values associated with quality services in Toulouse, this study explores social representations of criteria necessary to evaluate quality in out of home daycare. Structured interviews were realized with 30 parents, 47 early education professionals, 15 daycare center directors, and 11 experts (university teachers, pediatricians and psychologists). The interviews aimed at understanding educational ideologies and values, developmental objectives and definitions of quality of educational service. Thematic content analyses indicate that the predominant educational ideology is to offer children and their families an individualized service with priority given to children's affective needs. Discussion of children's early learning needs was either absent from educators’ discourse or was considered as an objective of later school life. Developmental objectives of early daycare in France concern most often the need for socio-affective regulation and acquisition of social rules. Cognitive or language development was rarely evoked. Quality of interaction between teachers and young children was rarely mentioned (process quality). Results are discussed in terms of historical, socio-economic and political specificity of the French early education context, underlining the need to examine contextual specificity in the study of the impact of quality services for child development. This study questions the validity of investigations designed to evaluate quality education as a simple universally applicable construct.     

Représentations sociales de la personne obèse et de l’obésité : effets de la situation de contact

This paper introduces a study about social representations of obese people and obesity. Two hundred normal-weighted women divided in two groups (presence vs absence of contact with an obese person) completed a word association tasks with inductive words “obese people” and “obesity”. Two instructions were proposed: one in which they responded for themselves (standard instruction) and another in which they responded for someone else (substitution instruction). Results of the Correspondences Factor Analysis support the hypothesis of an intergroup contact effect on the explored social representations’ organization. Participants in contact with obese people seem to have a more empathetic representation than those who have no contact. Indeed, when participants did not respond for themselves, counter-normative representations were produced: stereotypical elements and a judgment on the physical characteristics were expressed. These results were discussed regarding theories of intergroup contact and of social representations.     

Mapping the Social World of Classrooms: A Multi‐Level,Multi‐Reporter Approach to Social Processes and Behavioral Engagement

Understanding the social context of classrooms has been a central goal of research focused on the promotion of academic development. Building on the current literature on classroom social settings and guided by a risk and protection framework, this study examines the unique and combined contribution of individual relationships and quality of classroom interactions on behavioral engagement among low‐income Latino students in kindergarten to fifth grade (N = 111). Findings indicate that individual relationships with teachers and peers and classroom quality, each independently predicted behavioral engagement. Moreover, high‐quality classrooms buffered the negative influence of students’ difficulties in individual relationships on behavioral engagement. Findings illuminate the need to consider multiple layers of social classroom relationships and interactions and suggest the potential benefit of targeting classroom quality as a mechanism for improving behavioral engagement in urban elementary schools.     

The Willingness of Military Members to Seek Help: The Role of Social Involvement and Social Responsibility

Anchored in the social organization theory of action and change, we use data from a large sample of active‐duty Air Force members to examine the direct and indirect influence of social involvement and social responsibility on willingness to seek help in times of need via trust in formal systems and informal supports. Group comparisons are conducted between junior male, junior female, senior male, and senior female service members. The key mediational path in the model for all groups is the connection between social involvement and willingness to seek help via trust in formal systems. These results can inform both unit‐ and community‐level interventions intended to increase the likelihood that active‐duty AF members will seek help in times of need.     

Differences in object sharing between infants at risk for autism and typically developing infants from 9 to 15 months of age

Object sharing abilities of infants at risk for autism (AR infants) and typically developing (TD) infants were compared from 9 to 15 months of age. Specifically, we examined the effects of infants’ locomotor abilities on their object sharing skills. 16 TD infants and 16 AR infants were observed during an “object sharing” paradigm at crawling and walking ages. Overall, AR walking infants demonstrated lower rates of object sharing with caregivers compared to TD walking infants. Specifically, AR walking infants had lower rates of giving and approaches toward caregivers compared to TD walking infants. AR walking infants also had lower step rates toward task-appropriate targets, i.e. caregivers and objects compared to TD walking infants. No group differences in object sharing were observed at crawling ages. Object sharing could be a valuable context for early identification of delays in infants at risk for developing Autism spectrum disorder.     

Together we cry: Social motives and preferences for group-based sadness

Group-based emotions play an important role in helping people feel that they belong to their group. People are motivated to belong, but does this mean that they actively try to experience group-based emotions to increase their sense of belonging? In this investigation, we propose that people may be motivated to experience even group-based emotions that are typically considered unpleasant to satisfy their need to belong. To test this hypothesis, we examined people's preferences for group-based sadness in the context of the Israeli National Memorial Day. In two correlational (Studies 1a and 1b) and two experimental (Studies 2 and 3) studies, we demonstrate that people with a stronger need to belong have a stronger preference to experience group-based sadness. This effect was mediated by the expectation that experiencing sadness would be socially beneficial (Studies 1 and 2). We discuss the implications of our findings for understanding motivated emotion regulation and intergroup relations.     

When talking makes you feel like a group: The emergence of group-based emotions

Group-based emotions are emotional reactions to group concerns and have been shown to emerge when people appraise events while endorsing a specific social identity. Here we investigate whether discussing a group-relevant event with other group members affects emotional reactions in a similar way. In two experiments, we confronted participants with an unfair group-relevant event, while manipulating their social identity and whether they discussed the event or an unrelated topic. Our major finding is that having group members discuss the unfair group-relevant event led to emotions that were more negative than in the irrelevant discussion and comparable to those observed when social identity had been made salient explicitly beforehand. Moreover, it also generated group-based appraisals of injustice (Experiment 1) and group-based identity (Experiment 2). This research sheds new light not only on the consequences of within-group sharing of emotions for the unfolding of intergroup relations but also on the nature of group-based emotions.     

Written threat: Electrophysiological evidence for an attention bias to affective words in social anxiety disorder

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is associated with heightened sensitivity to threat cues, typically represented by emotional facial expressions. To examine if this bias can be transferred to a general hypersensitivity or whether it is specific to disorder relevant cues, we investigated electrophysiological correlates of emotional word processing (alpha activity and event-related potentials) in 20 healthy participants and 20 participants with SAD. The experimental task was a silent reading of neutral, positive, physically threatening and socially threatening words (the latter were abusive swear words) while responding to a randomly presented dot. Subsequently, all participants were asked to recall as many words as possible during an unexpected recall test. Participants with SAD showed blunted sensory processing followed by a rapid processing of emotional words during early stages (early posterior negativity – EPN). At later stages, all participants showed enhanced processing of negative (physically and socially threatening) compared to neutral and positive words (N400). Moreover, at later processing stages alpha activity was increased specifically for negative words in participants with SAD but not in healthy controls. Recall of emotional words for all subjects was best for socially threatening words, followed by negative and positive words irrespective of social anxiety. The present findings indicate that SAD is associated with abnormalities in emotional word processing characterised by early hypervigilance to emotional cues followed by cognitive avoidance at later processing stages. Most importantly, the specificity of these attentional biases seems to change as a function of time with a general emotional bias at early and a more specific bias at later processing stages.     

The Cognitive Social Network in Dreams: Transitivity,Assortativity, and Giant Component Proportion Are Monotonic

For five individuals, a social network was constructed from a series of his or her dreams. Three important network measures were calculated for each network: transitivity, assortativity, and giant component proportion. These were monotonically related; over the five networks as transitivity increased, assortativity increased and giant component proportion decreased. The relations indicate that characters appear in dreams systematically. Systematicity likely arises from the dreamer's memory of people and their relations, which is from the dreamer's cognitive social network. But the dream social network is not a copy of the cognitive social network. Waking life social networks tend to have positive assortativity; that is, people tend to be connected to others with similar connectivity. Instead, in our sample of dream social networks assortativity is more often negative or near 0, as in online social networks. We show that if characters appear via a random walk, negative assortativity can result, particularly if the random walk is biased as suggested by remote associations.