L’évaluation psychologique en situation transculturelle : une révision de la littérature

Human migration provokes transcultural clinical encounters that may challenge the way clinicians see themselves and how they proceed in their usual practices. In the field of psychology, psychological assessment is an important tool to better understand the patients’ needs and to design psychological interventions. Considering that most diagnostic tests and manuals have been developed in the Western context, the application of these tools with other populations remains controversial. The present literature review aims to describe the state of current knowledge on psychological transcultural assessment. Specifically, we will address: (1) the use of psychological tests in transcultural contexts, (2) the development of the Cultural Formulation Interview (CFI, DSM-5) and (3) the clinical interview: language, therapeutic relationship and participation of interpreters. In the first section, we discuss the international norms for scales and tests translation and adaptation, as well as the cultural issues that may bias the test’ application and interpretation. In the second section, we describe the creation of the CFI, and its use in recent studies. The CFI is composed by four clusters: (1) cultural definition of a problem, (2) cultural perceptions of cause, context, and support, (3) cultural factors affecting self-coping and past help seeking, and (4) cultural factors affecting current help seeking. The revised studies indicated that the CFI has a positive impact on the cultural sensibilization of mental health professionals, also improving the relationship between the patients and professionals. The cultural formulation may also prevent misdiagnosis. Beyond the use of tests and structured interviews, the clinician also faces other challenges during a transcultural assessment. We discuss in the third section the transferential and countertransferential relationship in a transcultural situation. Several elements may influence this relationship, at an individual, institutional and societal level. The evaluation of these elements may allow the clinician to better understand results of the psychological assessment. We also describe the current guidelines for the use of interpreters during health consultations in France. In conclusion, several advances have been made in the field of transcultural psychological assessment, among other things the development of guides for good translation and cultural adaptation of tools, as well as the integration of cultural issues into the DSM. However, research and changes in clinical practice are still needed, as the evaluation of cultural biases in cognitive tests and the expansion of cultural competences training among clinicians.     

The conditioned anticipation of people (CAP) model of driving in urban spaces

Despite significant gains in overall collision rates, pedestrian and bicycle safety in complete street environments remains an on-going challenge. However, urban areas with the most risk exposure for pedestrians continue to maintain lower incident rates than their suburban counterparts (“Dangerous by Design” 2021). Under most driving circumstances, the over-rehearsed nature of driving leads to a psychological state similar to self-hypnosis, where attention is subconsciously maintained on the driving task while metacognitive awareness is minimized or eliminated. This state continues until some type of conflict, uncertainty, and/or novel stimulus is presented. The primary difference in driver attention in urban environments is postulated to result from the Conditioned Anticipation of People (CAP). Based on the human neurological predisposition to recognize and fixate on human faces and figures, we hypothesize that in areas where drivers have been conditioned to expect human presence, low-level metacognition is preemptively re-engaged to address their presence, resulting in higher attentional resource expenditure and increased distraction management. Such conditioning may be generated by contextual features common to pedestrian-friendly environments but, necessarily, must be reinforced over time by the Actual Presence of People (APP). CAP driver engagement is limited by the perceptual abilities of the driver such that at higher speeds or within wider corridors, the presence of pedestrians is more difficult to perceive. This results in a non-CAP attention pattern, exhibiting minimal metacognitive activity, high levels of automaticity, and reduced attention. This model was generated based on the observation that vulnerable user presence and the roadway contextual features that support the driver's ability to see vulnerable users were related to attention data measured during the SHRP2 Naturalistic Driving Study. Visually discernable features that were associated with vulnerable user presence had relationships with attention and large effect sizes (η² > 0.5). Contextual features that had relationships with vulnerable user presence, but minimal visual impact or interfered with the driver’s ability to see vulnerable users had no relationship to driver attention. This behavioral pattern provides supportive evidence for the proposed model.     

Working in Indigenous Contexts: Self‐Reported Experiences of Non‐Indigenous Australian Psychologists

Despite assertions in the literature that psychologists adopt culturally inappropriate strategies for working with Indigenous clients, there is little empirical evidence about this. The aim of this study was to document the self‐reported experiences of non‐Indigenous psychologists working with Indigenous clients, the factors that they felt constrain these interactions, and the clinical, assessment and communication strategies they perceived as effective in Indigenous contexts. Structured interviews were held with 23 psychologists, 18 females and five males, with age groups ranging from 20–30 to 50+. Thematic analysis of the data revealed that participants experienced contradictions between the typical Western white psychologists' ways of interacting with clients, which they had been taught and the typical ways in which relationships are structured in Indigenous communities. The results suggest that the Western model of psychological training does not work very well in Indigenous contexts, and that psychologists working in Indigenous contexts have to work out their own methods on a trial‐and‐error basis. This points to the need for more systematic cultural competence training. However, there is a lack of research into the effectiveness of psychological intervention from the viewpoints of Indigenous clients themselves.     

Color and women attractiveness: when red clothed women are perceived to have more intense sexual intent

Research has shown that with some nonhuman primates, red is associated with greater sexual attractiveness of females, and recent studies found that a woman with red clothes increases attraction behavior in men. However, the mechanism that explains such behavior was not studied. In this experiment, we hypothesized that men overestimated women's sexual intent when wearing red clothing. Participants evaluated attractiveness and the sexual intent of a woman presented in a photograph wearing a red, a blue, a green or a white tee-shirt. It was found that men evaluated higher sexual intent in the red clothing condition. It was also found that perception of the woman's sexual intent was not moderated by attractiveness rating.     

Domain-specificity and individual differences in worry

Worrying is generally perceived to be an undesirable mental state. An evolutionary approach suggests, however, despite the potential distress, worry may function to focus individuals’ attention on evolutionarily-relevant tasks. In the current study (N = 193), we demonstrated that participants’ primary worries were focused within domains central to reproductive success and mate-value. Furthermore, mating strategy predicted worries in the domains of social status and mating. Neuroticism, as an individual difference reflecting vigilance to threats, was correlated with worry about fitness-relevant but not fitness-irrelevant domains. The current study documents the first domain-specific assessment of worries and complements this analysis with intriguing individual difference predictors of worry.     

Why More Intelligent Individuals Like Classical Music

The origin of values and preferences is an unresolved theoretical problem in social and behavioral sciences. The Savanna‐IQ Interaction Hypothesis, derived from the Savanna Principle and a theory of the evolution of general intelligence, suggests that more intelligent individuals are more likely to acquire and espouse evolutionarily novel values and preferences than less intelligent individuals but that general intelligence has no effect on the acquisition and espousal of evolutionarily familiar values and preferences. Recent work on the evolution of music suggests that music in its evolutionary origin was always vocal and that purely instrumental music is evolutionarily novel. The Savanna‐IQ Interaction Hypothesis would then imply that more intelligent individuals are more likely to prefer purely instrumental music than less intelligent individuals, but general intelligence has no effect on the preference for vocal music. The analyses of American (General Social Surveys) and British (British Cohort Study) data are consistent with this hypothesis. Additional analyses suggest that the effect of intelligence on musical preference is not a function of the cognitive complexity of music. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Reflection and reasoning in moral judgment

While there is much evidence for the influence of automatic emotional responses on moral judgment, the roles of reflection and reasoning remain uncertain. In Experiment 1, we induced subjects to be more reflective by completing the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) prior to responding to moral dilemmas. This manipulation increased utilitarian responding, as individuals who reflected more on the CRT made more utilitarian judgments. A follow-up study suggested that trait reflectiveness is also associated with increased utilitarian judgment. In Experiment 2, subjects considered a scenario involving incest between consenting adult siblings, a scenario known for eliciting emotionally driven condemnation that resists reasoned persuasion. Here, we manipulated two factors related to moral reasoning: argument strength and deliberation time. These factors interacted in a manner consistent with moral reasoning: A strong argument defending the incestuous behavior was more persuasive than a weak argument, but only when increased deliberation time encouraged subjects to reflect.