[How educating students in depression among older people can affect their motivation to work with this population]. / La formation en gérontopsychiatrie sur la dépression chez les étudiants de licence de deuxième année en psychologie (université de Clermont-Ferrand) : impact sur leur motivation à travailler auprès de personnes âgées.

INTRODUCTION: Negative representations of ageing are conveyed in our society. We see that people frequently avoid working with older people, due to a lack of motivation. Depressive signs in older people are more frequently associated with normal ageing, rather than a pathology, giving health professionals the feeling that therapeutic efforts are likely to be unproductive. Yet, depression is a major public health problem, particularly among older people. It is a real pathology, affecting 20% of people aged 65 and older. In retirement homes the percentage can be as high as 45%. OBJECTIVE: To study and evaluate how theoretical knowledge about older people and depression affects the motivation of 2nd year psychology students to work with this population. METHODS: The study involves two groups. One of the groups (experimental group) followed an 8hour course on depression in older people, whereas the other (control group) followed an 8hour course on a different topic. The study was conducted in two parts. First, the two groups answered an initial questionnaire which measured how motivated they were to work with older people and what they knew about depression in older people. Then, after the experimental phase, all of the students answered the same questionnaire a second time. RESULTS: The comparison shows a significant decline in knowledge between T1 and T2 for the control group (P<0.05), and a significant increase in the number of correct answers for the experimental group (P<0.001). Statistical results show that after receiving education in depression, students are more motivated to work with older people. Moreover, we observe that the more knowledge students have in this field, the more motivated they will be to work with older people. DISCUSSION: Whereas there were no differences in knowledge before the course, we observed that the knowledge of the group who took part in the course about older people improved. Also, the evaluation showed that students who took the course were significantly more knowledgeable. Regarding motivation, our results vary according to the type of motivation. Overall, as regards intrinsic motivation, we observed an increase in motivation, insofar as the students who had followed the course were subsequently more likely to work with older people. Taking part in the course led to a systematic increase in the evaluation of extrinsic motivation. With respect to knowledge, half of the students interviewed think sadness or depression is a natural part of ageing. So, we observe that future health professionals often regard the signs observed in this population, such as sadness, apathy, and depression, as part of normal ageing. The people working with older people do not make the connection to actions and consequently in this action to wrongly thinking they are not in control of the situation. Depression is widely underestimated. Forty percent of cases of depression among older people go undetected. This study highlights the importance of making health professionals and future health professionals more aware of depression among older people. Knowing more about depression in this population can help guide recourse to psychology in gerontology.

The conscious awareness of time distortions regulates the effect of emotion on the perception of time.

This study examined how the awareness of emotion-related time distortions modifies the effect of emotion on time perception. Before performing a temporal bisection task with stimulus durations presented in the form of neutral or emotional facial expressions (angry, disgusted and ashamed faces), some of the participants read a scientific text providing either correct or incorrect information on the emotion-time relationship. Other participants did not receive any information. The results showed that the declarative knowledge allowed the participants to regulate (decrease) the intensity of emotional effects on the perception of time, but did not trigger temporal effects when the emotional stimuli did not automatically induce emotional reactions that distorted time.

[Emotional valence of words in schizophrenia]. / Valence émotionnelle des mots dans la schizophrénie.

AIM OF THE STUDY: Emotion recognition is a domain in which deficits have been reported in schizophrenia. A number of emotion classification studies have indicated that emotion processing deficits in schizophrenia are more pronounced for negative affects. Given the difficulty of developing material suitable for the study of these emotional deficits, it would be interesting to examine whether patients suffering from schizophrenia are responsive to positively and negatively charged emotion-related words that could be used within the context of remediation strategies. The emotional perception of words was examined in a clinical experiment involving schizophrenia patients. This emotional perception was expressed by the patients in terms of the valence associated with the words. In the present study, we investigated whether schizophrenia patients would assign the same negative and positive valences to words as healthy individuals. METHODS: Twenty volunteer, clinically stable, outpatients from the Psychiatric Service of the University Hospital of Clermont-Ferrand were recruited. Diagnoses were based on DSM-IV criteria. Global psychiatric symptoms were assessed using the Positive and Negative Symptoms Scale (PANSS). The patients had to evaluate the emotional valence of a set of 300 words on a 5-point scale ranging from "very unpleasant" to "very pleasant". RESULTS: . The collected results were compared with those obtained by Bonin et al. (2003) [13] from 97 University students. Correlational analyses of the two studies revealed that the emotional valences were highly correlated, i.e. the schizophrenia patients estimated very similar emotional valences. More precisely, it was possible to examine three separate sets of 100 words each (positive words, neutral words and negative words). The positive words that were evaluated were the more positive words from the norms collected by Bonin et al. (2003) [13], and the negative words were the more negative examples taken from these norms. The neutral words reflected the more neutral emotional valences collected. The results suggested that the emotional valences for the negative words were significantly greater in the patients than is observed in the collected norms (P<0.001). Moreover, the emotional valence associated with positive words was significantly lower in the patients than in the collected norms (P<0.001). Nevertheless, only 16 words differed significantly in terms of evaluated emotional valence between patients and young adults. CONCLUSIONS: Despite their overall emotional impairments, the patients with schizophrenia had a very similar perception of word valence as controls. This result suggests that the emotional perception of most emotional words is preserved. This research provides data important to consider during rehabilitation. Moreover, this study will make it possible to select stimuli for use in future studies of emotion in patients.

Effects of the amnesic drug lorazepam on complete and partial information retrieval and monitoring accuracy.

RATIONALE: In Koriat's accessibility model (Koriat, Psychol Rev, 100:609-639, 1993; Koriat, J Exp Psychol Gen, 124:311-333, 1995), when a person fails to recall a required target, he or she can nevertheless provide some partial information about the target. Moreover, individuals are able to provide feeling-of-knowing (FOK) judgments about the availability of the target in memory. The cues for the FOK evaluations reside in the products of the retrieval process itself. It was shown that the benzodiazepine lorazepam drug induces some impairment of memory. OBJECTIVES: The effects of the amnesic benzodiazepine lorazepam on the total and partial recall of recently learned material and on FOK ratings were investigated in healthy volunteers. METHODS: Twenty-eight healthy volunteers participated in the study: 14 of these received a capsule containing lorazepam (0.038 mg/kg) and 14 a placebo capsule. The material to be learned consisted of four-letter nonsense tetragrams with each letter providing partial information with regard to the four-letter target (Koriat, Psychol Rev, 100:609-639, 1993). RESULTS: The number of incorrect letters reported was higher for the lorazepam than for the placebo condition. The FOK magnitude was higher for the placebo participants than for the lorazepam participants. The predictive value of FOK for recognition was preserved by the drug. CONCLUSION: When studying four-letter nonsense letter strings, lorazepam participants present an impairment of episodic short-term memory and the drug has an effect on FOK estimates but not on the predictive accuracy of the FOK. The accessibility hypothesis of FOK was confirmed in this study and seems to retain some validity even under the effect of an amnesic drug.

A brief psychological intervention to improve adherence in type 2 diabetes.

OBJECTIVE: Diabetes perceptions, acceptance and treatment motivation are changeable factors of adherence. This study aimed to test the effects of brief psychological interventions based on diabetes threat and mastery perceptions in terms of adherence, acceptance and motivation. Physicians may find such interventions useful during a 15-minute consultation with diabetes patients. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS: This randomized controlled study included 80 patients with type 2 diabetes, recruited from the hospital diabetes department, who were randomly assigned to four intervention groups based on autobiographical recall. Those in the two intervention groups were asked to recall diabetic events based on mastery and threat perceptions, respectively, whereas those in the two control groups recalled non-diabetic events based on positive and negative emotions, respectively. Following this, all participants completed validated self-questionnaires assessing diabetes perceptions, acceptance, treatment motivation and adherence. RESULTS: Patients in the threat group reported less adherence (P<0.01) and less avoidance (P<0.05), and perceived diabetes as less threatening (P<0.05) than those in the mastery group. Similar results were obtained when the threat group was compared with its matched negative-emotion control group (P<0.05, P<0.05 and P=0.087, respectively). Patients in the mastery group reported feeling a stronger sense of mastery (P<0.05) than those in their positive-emotion control group and greater treatment acceptance than those in the threat group (P<0.01). CONCLUSION: Contrary to conventional medical belief, discussing threatening personal events with patients can yield positive results. Health professionals should take threat and mastery perceptions of diabetes into account during regular consultations with a view to improving treatment acceptance and adherence. With this brief intervention of type 2 diabetes patients, it was also more effective to alleviate their emotional difficulties than to enhance their perception of mastery.