The Brief Irritability Test (BITe, Holtzman et al., 2014 ) is a brief, reliable, and valid self-report measure of irritability. Despite the growing interest to understand the underlying causes and consequences of irritability, this questionnaire has not been developed and validated for a French-speaking population yet. In the present study, 413 participants completed our French adaptation of the BITe (i.e., TCI; Test Court d’Irritabilité) and measures of associated constructs (depression, anger, hostility, and aggression) and well-being (life satisfaction and social support). Descriptive, psychometric (i.e., Cronbach alpha and Spearman correlation coefficients), and factor analyses were conducted. An exploratory factor analysis in sample 1 (n = 209), yielded one single factor. The confirmatory factor analysis in sample 2 (n = 204) showed a reasonable fit of this single factor model explaining 55.5% of the variance and presenting a strong internal consistency (α = .80). Compared to the original English questionnaire, the TCI shares similar unidimensional factor organization and correlations with other constructs, although a gender bias was identified, with women scoring higher than men. Irritability was higher among respondents in the age range 17–25, compared to older adults. A hierarchical regression analysis showed that TCI scores significantly predict depressive symptoms when demographics were controlled for. In summary, the TCI presents good psychometric properties and could constitute a valuable tool to evaluate irritability in clinical and research contexts.

Iconic gesture-speech integration is a relatively recent field of investigation with numerous researchers studying its various aspects. The results obtained are just as diverse. The definition of iconic gestures is often overlooked in the interpretations of results. Furthermore, while most behavioral studies have demonstrated an advantage of bimodal presentation, brain activity studies show a diversity of results regarding the brain regions involved in the processing of this integration. Clinical studies also yield mixed results, some suggesting parallel processing channels, others a unique and integrated channel. This review aims to draw attention to the methodological variations in research on iconic gesture-speech integration and how they impact conclusions regarding the underlying phenomena. It will also attempt to draw together the findings from other relevant research and suggest potential areas for further investigation in order to better understand processes at play during speech integration process.

Background Cognitive models indicated that social anxiety disorder (SAD) would be caused and maintained by a biased attentional processing of threatening information. This study investigates whether socially anxious children may present impaired attentional engagement and disengagement from negative emotional faces, as well as their underlying event-related potential responses. Methods and findings Fifteen children with high levels of social anxiety (HSA; 9 boys; mean age = 9.99y; SD = 1.14) and twenty low socially anxious children (LSA; 16 boys; mean age = 10.47y; SD = 1.17) participated in a spatial cueing task in which they had to detect targets following neutral/disgusted faces in a valid or invalid location. No group effect was reported on reaction times [p>.05]. However, electrophysiological data showed lower P3a amplitude in HSA children compared with the LSA group when processing facial stimuli. They also reported larger N2 amplitudes for valid-disgusted targets and a larger P3a amplitude for the invalid-disgusted ones. Conclusion In terms of electrophysiological data, our results validated, the hypothesis of attentional disengagement difficulties in SAD children. We also confirm the idea that high levels of social anxiety are associated with cognitive control impairments and have a greater impact on the processing efficiency than on the performance effectiveness.

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