Marc Bigras

Para compreender o processo de desenvolvimento, aquisição de habilidades e adaptação da criança ou adolescente ao meio, é necessário conhecer a dinâmica das interações familiares, do meio sociocultural, assim como as transformações a que estes contextos ...

Whereas studies of the past 10 years have shown the executive functions (EFs) in adults to be differentiated into at least three principal components (working memory, inhibition, and flexibility), EF structure in children is far less well understood despite a large body of research on the subject. A study was undertaken to test different structural models of EFs through confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) on a large sample of typically developing kindergarteners (N = 272). The method employed sought to remedy the shortcomings of past research in this field such as absence of CFA, insufficient number of EF components tested, insufficient number of indicators per latent variable, and absence of control on processing speed. Children were assessed using a battery of EF tasks developed by the researchers to measure working memory (WM), flexibility, and inhibition (backward word span, backward block span, fruit Stroop, day-night test, hand Stroop, Trails-P, card sort, face sort, and verbal fluency shift). CFA results show the best-fitting model to comprise two factors, namely, an inhibition factor and a WM-flexibility factor. Invariance analyses suggest that this structure is the same for girls and boys and that latent variable means do not differ by sex. These results support the hypothesis of EF differentiation during development. The researchers formulate other hypotheses regarding neurophysiological development.

Executive function (EF) deficits have yet to be demonstrated convincingly in children with disruptive behaviour disorders (DBD), as only a few studies have reported these. The presence of EF weaknesses in children with DBD has often been contested on account of the high comorbidity between DBD and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and of methodological shortcomings regarding EF measures. Against this background, the link between EF and disruptive behaviours in kindergarteners was investigated using a carefully selected battery of EF measures. Three groups of kindergarteners were compared: (1) a group combining high levels of disruptive behaviours and ADHD symptoms (COMB); (2) a group presenting high levels of disruptive/aggressive behaviours and low levels of ADHD symptoms (AGG); and (3) a normative group (NOR). Children in the COMB and AGG groups presented weaker inhibition capacities compared with normative peers. Also, only the COMB group showed weaker working memory capacities compared with the NOR group. Results support the idea that preschool children with DBD have weaker inhibition capacities and that this weakness could be common to both ADHD and DBD.

In this article, the authors reflect on co-occurrence of different types of maltreatment that adolescent mothers have suffered during their childhood in order to better understand intergenerational transmission of maltreatment. They underline that studies on maltreatment that adults or adolescents have been subjected to during their childhood generally do not take into account co-occurrence of different types of maltreatment. The authors first attempt to verify if adolescent mothers are different from women of the general population in regards to prevalence and co-occurrence of various types of maltreatment suffered during their own development. They then try to establish prevalence and co-occurrence of types of maltreatment in relation to diagnoses of major depression or conduct disorder in adolescent mothers.

Objective: To understand the transmis- sion mechanisms of psychosocial difficulties prompted by teenage mother and baby interac- tions. The hypothesis is that the quality of the mother-child exchanges relies on linked with the characteristics of the mother, such as being abused and poor preparation for motherhood, as well as the characteristics of the child. Method: Direct ob- servation of the

The aim was to investigate the physical and psychological dating violence among adolescents with respect to the profiles of directionality - only man perpetrates, only woman perpetrates, and bidirectional, ie, both perpetrate violence. Sample was performed by two-stage cluster selection in public and private school in the city of Recife (PE), Brazil, presenting data on 355 adolescents of both sexes between 15 and 19 years old. Psychological violence was measured in dimensions threat, verbal/emotional, and relational. Statistical analyzes incorporated the sampling weight and the complex sample design. Violence is bidirectional in most forms studied (83.9%) and girls reported higher levels of perpetration of physical violence, and boys reported more perpetration of relational violence. It was concluded that adolescent dating violence shows a pattern where partners attack each other, both physically and psychologically. Future research should study the patterns of these acts of violence, keeping the adolescent couple as the unit of analysis and exploring the context in which such violence occurs.

In this article we study the mecanisms of the transmission of socioaffective problems between two family subsystems, that is marital and parent-child relationship, under contextual stresses such as low income, and family member's characteristics such as child's age and gender. A sample of couples with or without a child allowed a first study to estimate the impact of the presence of the child on the marital relationship when the two other studies addressed the complementary issue of the impact of marital relationships on the child. Results of these studies contributed to demonstrate the interdepen- dency of family's subsystems and underline the importance to consider each family member as source of influence on others. We also argue that an aversive response to extrafamilial stresses might lead to intrafamial relationship stresses, but the strenght of this link depends on characteristics of family members.

Les théories biologique et de l'apprentissage social soutiennent que les jeunes garçons sont plus réactifs aux stress familiaux et extrafamiliaux. Aussi avançons-nous l'hypothèse que ces conditions défavorables seront davantage associées aux interactions méres-garçons difficiles plutôt que mères-filles. I,'étude porte sur un échantillon de 97 paires mère-enfant observés dans nos laboratoires en présence d'une mère et d'un enfant étranger. Les mères

Cette étude présente les étapes ayant mené à l'élaboration du Q-Sort sur la relation conjugale (Q-RC). Le QRC est composé de 100 énoncés constituant une description spécifique d'un aspect d'une relation conjugale entre un homme et une femme. Le Q-RC requiert des conjoints qu'ils se placent dans une position d'observateur par rapport à leur relation conjugale et qu'ils décrivent, à