The objective of this study was to identify the relationship between social support and the functional capacity of elderly persons with cognitive alterations. It is a descriptive, cross-sectional and quantitative study. The subjects were 101 elderly persons registered in Family Health Centers whose performance in the Mini-Exam for Mental Status was below a certain specified level in a previous ...

The proliferation of specialized domestic batterer treatment programs suggests that batterers differ from other offenders in important ways. The psychopathic personality represents a constellation of personality traits, which may be relevant to the differentiation of batterers from other offenders. In a sample of 172 county jail inmates, we examined whether antisocial batterers can be distingui...

It was hypothesized that combined individual child vulnerability (anxious solitude) and interpersonal stress (peer exclusion) would predict the strongest responses to experimentally manipulated behavioral peer rejection. Results indicated that in a sample of 3rd graders (N = 160, 59% girls), anxious solitary excluded children displayed more behavioral manifestations of social helplessness befor...

A meta-analysis of 13 psychiatric epidemiological studies consisting of 33572 persons in 6550 families yielded an estimate prevalence rate of 58.2 per thousand population. Organic psychosis (prevalence rate 0.4), schizophrenia (2.7), affective disorders (12.3) contributed a rate of 15.4 for psychoses. The prevalence rate for mental retardation (6.9), epilepsy (4.4), neurotic disorders (20.7), a...

Gilles de la Tourette syndrome (GTS) holds a unique status as quintessentially neuropsychiatric condition at the interface between neurology (movement disorder) and psychiatry (behavioural condition). This is a reflection of the common observation that the vast majority of patients present with behavioural problems in association with the motor and vocal tics which define GTS. The present artic...

We investigated whether people are able to detect in a relatively automatic manner the dominant or submissive status of persons engaged in social interactions. Using a variant of the affective Simon task (De Houwer & Eelen, 1998), we demonstrated that the verbal response DOMINANT or SUBMISSIVE was facilitated when it had to be made to a target person that was respectively dominant or submissive...

Several factors like pupils' characteristics, school conditions and family context have been pointed out in the literature as being linked to academic achievement. Regarding the latter, family socio-economic status and parental support have been identified as determining variables on success at school. The current study analyses the influence of family support on the achievement of school child...

In one of the Father Brown short-stories, G.K. Chesterton described the (fictitious) French detective Aristide Valentin by writing that ‘‘(h)e was not ‘a thinking machine’; for that is a brainless phrase of modern fatalism and materialism. A machine only is a machine because it cannot think.’’ Although this aphorism dates from 1911, long before the notion of a thinking machine became popular, i...

Twenty-one Parkinsonian patients were tested in on and off phases during chronic levodopa therapy for cognitive function, affective status, and evaluation of motor performance with reaction and movement times. A worsening of mood was observed from the on to the off phase. No variation in cognitive performance was observed from the on to the off phase in spite of evident motor changes. Mood chan...

The early visual event-related 'N170 response' is sensitive to human body configuration and it is enhanced to nude versus clothed bodies. We tested whether the N170 response as well as later EPN and P3/LPP responses to nude bodies reflect the effect of increased arousal elicited by these stimuli, or top-down allocation of object-based attention to the nude bodies. Participants saw pictures of c...