No abstract

No abstract

A high number of studies on pharmacogenetics of antidepressants have been published during the past decades. However, contradictory results still limit clinical use of these findings. Future studies should include functional analyses and consider gene-gene and gene-environment interactions. This will aid in facilitating a future use of pharmacogenetics in clinical practice, likely leading to improved patient care.

No abstract

Typically, adults give a primary role to the agent’s intention to harm when performing a moral judgment of accidental harm. By contrast, children often focus on outcomes, underestimating the actor’s mental states when judging someone for his action, and rely on what we suppose to be intuitive and emotional processes. The present study explored the processes involved in the development of the capacity to integrate agents’ intentions into their moral judgment of accidental harm in 5 to 8-year-old children. This was done by the use of different metacognitive trainings reinforcing different abilities involved in moral judgments (mentalising abilities, executive abilities, or no reinforcement), similar to a paradigm previously used in the field of deductive logic. Children’s moral judgments were gathered before and after the training with non-verbal cartoons depicting agents whose actions differed only based on their causal role or their intention to harm. We demonstrated that a metacognitive training could induce an important shift in children’s moral abilities, showing that only children who were explicitly instructed to “not focus too much” on the consequences of accidental harm, preferentially weighted the agents’ intentions in their moral judgments. Our findings confirm that children between the ages of 5 and 8 are sensitive to the intention of agents, however, at that age, this ability is insufficient in order to give a “mature” moral judgment. Our experiment is the first that suggests the critical role of inhibitory resources in processing accidental harm.

Proportional reasoning is a key topic both at school and in everyday life. However, students are often misled by their preconceptions regarding proportions. Our hypothesis is that these limitations can be mitigated by working on alternative ways of categorizing situations that enable more adequate inferences. Multiple categorization triggers flexibility, which enables reinterpreting a problem statement and adopting a more relevant point of view. The present study aims to show the improvements in proportional reasoning after an intervention focusing on such a multiple categorization. Twenty-eight 4th and 5th grade classes participated in the study during one school year. Schools were classified by the SES of their neighborhood. The experimental group received 12 math lessons focusing on flexibly envisioning a situation involving proportional reasoning from different points of view. At the end of the school year, compared to a control group, the experimental group had better results on the posttest when solving proportion word problems and proposed more diverse solving strategies. The analyses also show that the performance gap linked to the school’s SES classification was reduced. This offers promising perspectives regarding multiple categorization as a path to overtake preconceptions and develop cognitive flexibility at school.

No abstract

No abstract