LA MÈRE ET SON BÉBÉ: VARIATIONS CULTURELLES ANALYSE CRITIQUE DE LA LITTÉRATURE*

Infant-caretaking as a complex activity is a part of the culture. Each country, each ethnic group has his own norms, theories and practices. Three facets of the mother-infant relationship (from the point of view of the mother) can be identified: they are practices (nursing and home stimulations), representations and folk theories, and styles of interaction. They all vary in function of environmental, social and cultural factors, the strength of each is discussed here. Also, the first part of this paper informs the reader on methodological problems in this kind of studies. And, in the last one, mother-infant relationship in the migration context is studied.     

Parent and actometer measures of motor activity level in the young infant

Motor activity level is one dimension of infant temperament for which parental judgment can be validated against a truly independent criterion. Two studies were conducted, the first involving a 27-min sample of behavior in a structured, attention-getting situation, and the second involving a 24-hr sample of in-home behavior. In both studies, parent perception of the 3- or 4-month-old as measured by the Activity Level (AL) scale of the Rothbart Infant Behavior Questionnaire was compared to the composited readings from four mechanical motion recorders (actometers) worn, one per limb, by the infant. The AL scale did not correlate with the actometer measure, r=.05 and R=.00, and the expected convergence of the 3-month version of the IBQ activity scale with its mechanical counterpart was not found. In the 24-hr study, birth order and ponderal index were significantly correlated with 24-hr actometer scores; first-borns and thin infants were most active.     

Variables differentiating affective interaction in a family therapy and a control group: Father-child welfare and mother-child emergency affect

In this study of 37 pre-therapy and 23 matched control families who never sought family therapy, father-child welfare affect and mother-child emergency affect were significantly higher in the control families. Control families were found generally to express more Welfare and Emergency emotion. Affective expression between parents did not significantly differentiate the groups.This study has been supported by Grant No. MA-4510 of the Medical Research Council of Canada and was presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, September 1983. The authors wish to express their thanks to Toby Schwartz, Harriet Gold-Kaats, and Terry Tannenbaum-Dascal, who acted as coders and research assistants; Joseph Beltempo, BSc, who helped in the statistical analysis; and James Robbins, PhD, who gave much valuable advice.     

An electronic cine camera system for the automatic collection and analysis of high-speed movement of unrestrained animals

A system is decribed that collects visual data using a solid-state photodiode image sensor at rates of up to 600 frames/sec in a binary format suitable for image-analysis techniques. Of particular interest is the system’s ability to analyze high-speed movement of animals without prior modification of the subject (e.g., attachment of lamps or reflectors to the subject).     

Negative self-imagery in social anxiety contaminates social interactions

Patients with social phobia report experiencing negative images of themselves performing poorly when in feared social situations. The present study investigates whether such negative self-imagery (based on memory of past social situations) contaminates social interactions. High socially anxious volunteers participated in two conversations with another volunteer (conversational partner). During one conversation, the socially anxious volunteers held in mind a negative self-image, and during the other they held in mind a less negative (control) self-image. As predicted, when holding the negative image the socially anxious volunteers felt more anxious, reported using more safety behaviours, believed that they performed more poorly, and showed greater overestimation of how poorly they came across (relative to ratings by the conversational partner). Conversational partners rated the socially anxious volunteers' performance as poorer in the negative image condition. Furthermore, the conversation was contaminated since both groups of participants rated its quality as poorer in the negative image condition.     

Does visual word identification involve a sub-phonemic level?

The phonological codes activated in visual word recognition can be thought of minimally as strings of discrete and unstructured phoneme-like units. We asked whether these codes might additionally express a letter string's phonological form at a featural or gestural level. Specifically, we asked whether the priming of a word (e.g. sea, film, basic) by a rhyming non-word would depend on the non-word's phonemic-feature similarity to the word. The question was asked within a mask--prime--target--mask sequence with both brief (57 ms in Experiments 1 and 2) and long (486 ms in Experiment 1) prime durations. Non-word primes that differed from their targets by a single phonemic feature (initial voicing as in ZEA, VILM, PASIC) led to faster target lexical decisions than non-word primes that differed by more than a single phonemic feature (e.g. VEA, JILM, SASIC). Visual word recognition seems to involve a sub-phonemic level of processing.     

An invariant dimensional liability model of gender differences in mental disorder prevalence: evidence from a national sample

Epidemiological studies of categorical mental disorders consistently report that gender differences exist in many disorder prevalence rates and that disorders are often comorbid. Can a dimensional multivariate liability model be developed to clarify how gender impacts diverse, comorbid mental disorders? We pursued this possibility in the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC; N = 43,093). Gender differences in prevalence were systematic such that women showed higher rates of mood and anxiety disorders, and men showed higher rates of antisocial personality and substance use disorders. We next investigated patterns of disorder comorbidity and found that a dimensional internalizing-externalizing liability model fit the data well, where internalizing is characterized by mood and anxiety disorders, and externalizing is characterized by antisocial personality and substance use disorders. This model was gender invariant, indicating that observed gender differences in prevalence rates originate from women and men's different average standings on latent internalizing and externalizing liability dimensions. As hypothesized, women showed a higher mean level of internalizing, while men showed a higher mean level of externalizing. We discuss implications of these findings for understanding gender differences in psychopathology and for classification and intervention.