David Da Fonseca

The social-cognitive model of achievement motivation and the 2 × 2 achievement goal framework

Two studies examined hypotheses drawn from a proposed modification of the social-cognitive model of achievement motivation that centered on the 2 x 2 achievement goal framework. Implicit theories of ability were shown to be direct predictors of performance attainment and intrinsic motivation, and the goals of the 2 x 2 framework were shown to account for these direct relations. Perceived competence was shown to be a direct predictor of achievement goals, not a moderator of relations implicit theory or achievement goal effects. The results highlight the utility of attending to the approach-avoidance distinction in conceptual models of achievement motivation and are fully in line with the hierarchical model of achievement motivation.

The trichotomous achievement goal model and intrinsic motivation: A sequential mediational analysis.

This experiment was designed to extend the research by Elliot and Harackiewicz (1996) on the trichotomous achievement goal model in several important ways and to more thoroughly document the processes through which the goals in the trichotomous model influence intrinsic motivation. Results indicated that performance–avoidance goals undermined intrinsic motivation relative to performance–approach and mastery goals; the latter goals evidenced the same intrinsic motivation. These results were obtained using highly evaluative performance goal manipulations, with early adolescent participants, and for a motor task relevant to physical ability. Sequential mediational analyses revealed that competence valuation, state anxiety, and task absorption processes accounted for the observed effects. Perceived competence served neither mediating nor moderating roles.

Emotion Understanding in Children with ADHD

Several studies suggest that children with ADHD tend to perform worse than typically developing children on emotion recognition tasks. However, most of these studies have focused on the recognition of facial expression, while there is evidence that context plays a major role on emotion perception. This study aims at further investigating emotion processing in children with ADHD, by assessing not only facial emotion recognition (Experiment 1) but also emotion recognition on the basis of contextual cues (Experiment 2). Twenty-seven children and adolescents with ADHD were compared to age-matched typically developing controls. Importantly, findings of this study show that emotion-processing difficulties in children with ADHD extend beyond facial emotion and also affect the recognition of emotions on the basis of contextual information. Our data thus indicate that children with ADHD have an overall emotion-processing deficit.

Recognition of biological motion in children with autistic spectrum disorders

It is widely accepted that autistic children experience difficulties in processing and recognizing emotions. Most relevant studies have explored the perception of faces. However, context and bodily gestures are also sources from which we derive emotional meanings. We tested 23 autistic children and 23 typically developing control children on their ability to recognize point-light displays of a persons actions, subjective states and emotions. In a control task, children had to recognize point-light displays of everyday objects. The children with autism only differed from the control children in their ability to name the emotional point-light displays. This suggests that children with autism can extract complex meanings from bodily movements but may be less sensitive to higher-order emotional information conveyed by human movement. The results are discussed in the context of a specific deficit in emotion perception in children with autism.

Attention to low-and high-spatial frequencies in categorizing facial identities, emotions and gender in children with autism

This study was aimed at investigating face categorization strategies in children with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD). Performance of 17 children with ASD was compared to that of 17 control children in a face-matching task, including hybrid faces (composed of two overlapping faces of different spatial bandwidths) and either low- or high-pass filtered faces. Participants were asked to match faces on the basis of identity, emotion or gender. Results revealed that children with ASD used the same strategies as controls when matching faces by gender. By contrast, in the identity and the emotion conditions, children with ASD showed a high-pass bias (i.e., preference for local information), contrary to controls. Consistent with previous studies on autism, these findings suggest that children with ASD do use atypical (local-oriented) strategies to process faces.

When Depression Mediates the Relationship Between Entity Beliefs and Performance

The aim of this study was to determine whether depression can explain the negative relationship between academic performance and the belief that intelligence is a fixed trait, i.e., entity belief. A sample of 353 French volunteer adolescents (age 11–16) completed questionnaires assessing entity theory and depressive symptoms (Children Depression Inventory: CDI). Academic performance was assessed by math performance while controlling for baseline level of math ability. Results of this study revealed that entity theory is a significant negative predictor of academic performance and a significant positive predictor of depression. Importantly, our findings also show that depression plays a significant mediating role between entity theory and academic performance. Our findings indicate that individuals who consider their abilities to be non-malleable are more likely to develop depressive symptoms which, in turn, decrease academic performance. These findings contribute to tailoring specific prevention and treatment programs for childhood and adolescent depression.

Just another social scene: evidence for decreased attention to negative social scenes in high-functioning autism.

The adaptive threat-detection advantage takes the form of a preferential orienting of attention to threatening scenes. In this study, we compared attention to social scenes in 15 high-functioning individuals with autism (ASD) and matched typically developing (TD) individuals. Eye-tracking was recorded while participants were presented with pairs of scenes, either emotional positive-neutral, emotional negative-neutral or neutral–neutral scenes. Early allocation of attention, the first image fixated in each pair, differed between groups: contrary to TD individuals who showed the typical threat-detection advantage towards negative images, the ASD group failed to show a bias toward threat-related scenes. Later processing of stimuli, indicated by the total fixation to the images during the 3-s presentation, was found unaffected in the ASD group. These results support the hypothesis of an early atypical allocation of attention towards natural social scenes in ASD, that is compensated in later stages of visual processing.

Do children perceive features of real and cartoon faces in the same way? Evidence from typical development and autism

In the current study, typically developing children and children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) were presented with a facial-feature discrimination task including both real and cartoon faces, displayed either upright or inverted. Results demonstrated that typically developing children were more accurate at discriminating facial features from upright than from inverted faces and that this effect was specific to real faces. By contrast, children with ASD failed to show such a specific pattern of performance for processing facial features displayed in real faces. Findings of the current study suggest that face type (real vs. cartoon) does not affect perceptual ability in children with ASD as it does in typically developing children.

Mr. Grimace or Ms. Smile Does Categorization Affect Perceptual Processing in Autism

This study compared the influence of categorization on perceptual processing in adults with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) and normal control participants. Participants were asked to categorize hybrid faces (composed of two overlapped faces of different spatial bandwidths) by gender and emotion. Control participants exhibited a bias for low-pass information during gender categorization and a bias for high-pass information during emotion categorization. By contrast, adults with ASD showed the same low-pass bias in both tasks. This absence of a shift in processing style in the ASD group is discussed in terms of diminished top-down modulation in autism.

Schizophrénie ou syndrome d'Asperger ?

Patients with Asperger syndrome are often diagnosed late or are wrongly considered to have schizophrenia. Misdiagnosing Asperger syndrome creates serious problems by preventing effective therapy. Several clinical signs described in Asperger syndrome could also be considered as clinical signs of schizophrenia, including impaired social interactions, disabilities in communication, restricted interests, and delusions of persecution. A number of clinical features may facilitate the differential diagnosis: younger age at onset, family history of pervasive developmental disorder, recurring conversations on the same topic, pragmatic aspects of language use, oddities of intonation and pitch, lack of imagination, and incomprehension of social rules are more characteristic of Asperger syndrome. Accurate distinction between Asperger syndrome and schizophrenia would make it possible to offer more treatment appropriate to the patients functioning.