L’impact d’une situation sociale anxiogène sur la reconnaissance d’expressions faciales émotionnelles (EFEs) chez des enfants

peer reviewedThis study addresses the relationship between the capacity of emotional facial expressions (EFEs) recognition and self-esteem in children placed in an anxious social situation. Seventy children (8 – 12 years) were placed in an anxious social situation of performance in which they were instructed to count aloud backwards, beginning at 200 in decrements of 13. After that, children were assessed on a decoding test of 16 photographs depicting EFE. For each photograph, they evaluated the presence of nine types of emotions. They also completed the Self-Perception Profile for Children (Pierrehumbert et al., 1987). No correlations emerged between the accuracy of EFE recognition and an increase of anxious feelings after the anxious social situation. However, self-esteem was correlated with performance on the EFE recognition test. Moreover, the lower the child’s level of self-esteem was, the more he/she perceived negative emotions in EFEs. In conclusion, social anxiety doesn’t seem to interfere with EFEs recognition performance in an anxious social situation. However, low level of self-esteem in children appears to be associated with deficits and interpretative bias in EFEs recognition in an anxious social situation

Les jeux pour comprendre l'aménagment du territoire

Planning is not anymore seeing as a neutral concept. During a long period planning has been conducted as a technical activity only. Nevertheless, space “is no longer a neutral category as it was between the 1960s and the 1980s that is viewed as a container for economic and social processes, but is rather the result of social relations among people living in a certain area or region where culture and cultural influences play a crucial role”(Knieling & Othengrafen, 2009, p. xxiii)1. Planning is indeed deeply depending on cultural context of a country and a region. Since the 1990s, the term planning culture covers comparative spatial planning research. This concept can be define as “the collective ethos and dominant attitudes of planners regarding the appropriate role of the state, market forces, and civil society in influencing social outcomes” (Sanyal, 2005, p. xxi)2. To date, planning culture literature concentrates on listing the observations and expert analyses. Our goal is to operationalise this concept as a set of values and attitudes shared by a particular group of people. For this purpose, we use experimental economics to gain empirical evidences on planning practices. Our presentation will be structured in three parts. At first, we will develop the concept of planning culture and illustrate it by the comparison of planning in Belgium and in the Netherlands. Despite many common characteristics, planning in those two countries strongly differs. On the one hand, both countries are densely populated and their territories are relatively similar. Although, on the other hand, their urban form are highly contrasted. Indeed, Belgium is characterized by an extreme sprawl whereas Netherlands has controlled the sub-urbanization processes. The second part of our presentation will be dedicated to the explanation of experimental economics. Experimental economics are experiments motivated by economics questions. “Experiments are a controlled data generation process. ‘Control’ means that most factors which influence behaviour are held constant and only one factor of interest (the “treatment”) is varied at a time”(Croson and Gächter, 2010, p. 124)3. To illustrate the field, we will realise an experiment in real time with the audience.Finally, we will finish our presentation by presenting some results of our current research that intends to objectify the role of planning culture in urban development. Based on experimental economics, our research aims to study the risk aversion as well as the importance of trust and cooperation in the development of partnership. To do so, we have organized four experiments with urban planning stakeholders in three different countries: Belgium, the Netherlands and Norway.SimsCity ValueCa

Sensitivity for self-discrepancy predicts alcohol consumption in alcohol- dependent inpatients with high self-consciousness

Background: A specific sense of self and sensitivity to self-threatening situations among alcohol-dependent (AD) individuals has often been reported by clinicians. Unpleasant self-awareness of situations of personal failure may lead to relapse, especially for AD individuals with high self-consciousness. However, the implication of Higgins’ self-discrepancy theory for alcohol-dependence has not yet been empirically investigated. This study tested the relation between self-discrepancies evaluated by the Self-Discrepancy Questionnaire and different self-related dimensions (i.e., self-consciousness, depression, emotional regulations strategies) in alcohol-dependence. Methods: Forty-four AD inpatients (28 men) presenting with an Axis-1 diagnosis of alcohol-dependence (DSMIV) and recruited during detoxification process completed Self-Discrepancy Questionnaire and others self-related questionnaires. Results: High self-discrepancies and associated distress were related to more negative affect, depression, abstract-analytical ruminations, and to lower adaptive emotion regulation strategies and higher alcohol craving and alcohol intake. Self-discrepancies and associated distress predicted alcohol intake but only in high selfconsciousness AD population. Conclusion: Self-discrepancies lead to discomfort and to emotional distress, which may results of more nonadaptive ruminations and less adaptive emotion regulation strategies. This unpleasant awareness of self-discrepancy predicted higher alcohol craving and alcohol intake. Two subpopulations were distinguished by the sensitivity to selfdiscrepancy according to their level of self-consciousness

Une analyse constructive des attitudes, des politiques et des programmes en ce qui concerne la radicalisation

CONRA

Capacities of cognitive and emotional empathy in relationship to interpersonal difficulties in alcohol dependant patients (AD)

The term empathy refers to two related human abilities: mental perspective taking (cognitive empathy) and the vicarious sharing of emotions (emotional empathy). The main object of this study was to explore the relationship between capacities of both aspects of empathy and their relationships with interpersonal difficulties in alcohol-dependant patients (AD). The research in alcoholism empathy has focalised around one aspect of cognitive empathy - the capacity to infer an emotional state-, and that essentially on the basis of emotional facial expression (EFE) recognition. However, researchers have shown little interest in the investigation of the other aspects of cognitive empathy. The present study focuses on the capacity to infer interpersonal intentions and on emotional empathy. As documented by the research on EFE decoding, AD patients show deficits in cognitive empathy. In this study, we investigated their capacity to infer interpersonal intentions in social situation. We hypothesized that AD patients compared to healthy individuals and to depressed patients will attributed more intentions of reject and of aggressiveness to other people on the basis of their EFE. In this study, emotional empathy was defined as the modulation of the emotional feeling state of the participant in function of the EFE display by other people. We hypothesized that the modulation in AD patient will be different from the one of healthy people in function of the Cloninger subtype of alcoholism (Cloninger, Bohman, Sigvardsson, 1987). This emotional reactivity will be more important in Type II alcoholism and less important in Type I alcoholism. As Mimicry facilitates feelings of empathy in healthy people, it was also investigated. Twenty type I AD patients, 20 type II AD patients, 20 depressed patients, and 20 healthy subjects participated to the study. The alcoholism subtype identification was maid according to the criteria from von Knorring, Bohman, von Knorring, and Oreland (1985). The participant completed questionnaires assessing the quality of interpersonal relationships, their usual quantity of alcohol consumption, and, for AD patients, their level of alcohol dependence. Their capacity to recognise faces was evaluated by the Benton facial recognition test. The empathy tasks were computerized. In the cognitive empathy task, the participants had to evaluate the adequacy (in a 7-point Likert scale) between a film of a face changing from a neutral EFE to an emotional EFE (the photographs come from the material of Matsumoto & Ekman, 1988) and an adjective descriptive of personality. Each adjective was weighted on the interpersonal dimensions of reject, aggressiveness, dominance, and affiliation. In the emotional empathy task, the participants had to evaluate their own emotional feeling state (in a 7-point Likert scale; from very negative to very positive) after watching a series of films depicting emotional faces (same material as before). During this task, the participant’s face was filmed in order to assess mimicry. The differences of empathy capacities between AD patients and control participants (depressed and healthy) are discussed in reference to the characteristics of their interpersonal relationship

Capacity for Cognitive and Emotional Empathy in Alcohol-Dependent Patients

This study assessed two previously unexplored facets of empathy in alcohol-dependent patients (ADs) divided into two groups according to Cloninger’s alcoholism typology: the attribution of intentions according to emotional facial expressions (EFEs) and emotional contagion in reaction to EFEs. Twenty-three male Type-I ADs, 21 male Type-II ADs, and 24 male control participants were compared in two computerized tasks. First, participants rated the extent to which an adjective descriptive of personality weighted on interpersonal dimensions (of rejection, aggressiveness, dominance, and affiliation) corresponded with a video of a neutral EFE that changed to an intense EFE. Second, participants evaluated their own emotional states after watching a series of videos that depicted EFEs while their own face was being filmed. The results showed that Type-I ADs attributed more rejection intentions and fewer affiliation intentions to EFEs compared with controls; however, depression might better explain this biased attribution. Furthermore, AD subtypes showed a different pattern of intention attribution according to the emotions that were portrayed and the sex of the stimulus. In addition, angry EFE mimicry was stronger in Type-II ADs than other participants. Finally, ADs expressed fewer positive emotions and more negative emotions than controls when watching EFEs. These findings emphasize the importance of differentiating alcoholism subtypes and contribute to the understanding of AD interpersonal behaviors

Production de l'habitat et enjeux territoriaux

Le projet de recherche est basé sur le concept de système de production de l'habitat. Un système de production de l'habitat vise à accroître et à améliorer l'offre en logements. Il se structure par les interactions entre les modes d'habiter (la demande), les modes de production (l'offre) et les modes de gestion (l'intervention de la puissance publique). Pour le contexte wallon, le système de production actuel est lié à un usage peu parcimonieux de la ressource foncière et à des problèmes importants d’étalement de la périurbanisation. Néanmoins, des signaux avant-coureurs de la mise en place d'un système de production plus vertueux vis-à-vis des principes stratégiques de l'aménagement du territoire semblent se manifester. La recherche I.5. intitulée « Production de l’habitat et enjeux territoriaux » ambitionne d'étudier l'ampleur de ces changements et de comprendre quels sont les processus socioéconomiques qui les instituent. Au final, son objectif est de préciser comment l’intervention de la puissance publique peut s’appuyer sur ces pratiques émergentes en vue de soutenir la transition vers un nouveau système pour la production de l’habitat wallon. Notre ambition est donc d’identifier les conditions qui conduisent à des pratiques plus vertueuses vis-à-vis des principes stratégiques de l’aménagement durable, afin de les renforcer et de les généraliser dès que possible

Impact of an anxious social situation on emotional facial expressions (EFE) recognition in children

Socially anxious children have difficulties to interact adequately with others. The core characteristic of social anxiety, the fear of being negatively evaluated by others, may among others, be based on problems with the decoding of other persons’ emotional facial expression (EFE). Up to now, the research on EFE recognition in socially anxious children has produced mixed results. Whereas some studies reported differences between anxious and healthy children in EFE recognition (e.g., Simonian, Beidel, Turner, Berkes, & Long, 2001), others didn’t find such differences (Melfsen & Florin, 2002). In this study, we addressed two new issues in the investigation of EFE recognition in socially anxious children. Firstly, we investigated self-esteem. Socially anxious children show low confidence in one’s cognitive and social abilities. Furthermore, high self-esteem is related to high capacities of EFE recognition (Garfield, Rogoff, & Steinberg, 1987), and more generally to high level of social functioning (Serretti et al., 1999 ; Shapira et al., 1999). Indeed, the perception of ourselves depends on the way we think others people perceive us. Secondly, past researches have investigated this issue in low anxious situations and thus, not in situations in which social anxious individuals feel threatened. The originality of the present study is that it addresses the relationship between EFE recognition performance and self-esteem in children placed in an anxious social situation. We predicted a low capacity to decode EFE in socially anxious children. Moreover, we hypothesised a relationship between a low self-esteem and difficulties to decode accurately EFE in an anxious social situation. Seventy children (8 – 12 years) were placed in an anxious social situation of performance in which they were instructed to count aloud backwards, beginning at 200 in increments of 13. Children assessed their emotional feeling state, including their degree of anxiety, before and after the anxious social situation. Furthermore, children were assessed on an EFE decoding test consisting of 16 photographs depicting EFE of happiness, anger, disgust, and sadness. For each photograph, they evaluated the presence of nine types of emotions on a 7-point Likert scale. They also completed the Self-Perception Profile for Children (Harter, 1985). No correlations emerged between the accuracy of EFE recognition and an increase of anxious feelings after the anxious social situation. However, self-esteem was correlated with performance on the EFE recognition test, r (70) = -.33, p < .01. Moreover, the lower the child’s level of self-esteem was, the more he/she perceived negative emotions (fear, anger, disgust, and shame) in EFE of anger. In conclusion, social anxiety doesn’t seem to interfere with EFE recognition performance in an anxious social situation. However, low level of self-esteem in children appears to be associated with deficits and interpretative bias in EFE recognition in an anxious social situation. The recognition of the expression of anger, an emotion socially threatening, seems particularly biased in children with low level of self-esteem