[Challenges and transformation of child psychiatry in France].

Challenges and transformation of child psychiatry in france. French child psychiatry is certainly faced with a demographic crisis which we can only hope to be a moment in its history, but also with multiple changes: the appearance of many sub-disciplines, its clinics and demands from the population, practices, theoretical- clinical references, fields of action of related medical disciplines (adult psychiatry, pediatric neurology, genetics, etc.), and the positions of its educational, pedagogical, social and medico-social network partners.

Using ESDM 12 hours per week in children with autism spectrum disorder: feasibility and results of an observational study.

Background: Early intervention for Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in France is heterogeneous and poorly evaluated to date. Early Start Denver Model (ESDM) is a developmental and behavioral model of intervention for toddlers with ASD which has already shown very interesting outcomes on the development of children with ASD in various studies with different settings. However, it is not possible with the current research to agree on the best setting.

[A mentalization-based perspective on childhood autism treatment].

Mentalization is a process by which a subject makes sense of both his own mental representations and of those around him. Disturbances in the mentalization process are found in several psychiatric disorders, notably borderline personality disorders for which mentalization-based treatments (MBT) have been developed and evaluated. Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) display a theory of mind impairments, which corresponds to disturbances in the mentalization process.

Are circadian rhythms new pathways to understand Autism Spectrum Disorder?

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a frequent neurodevelopmental disorder. ASD is probably the result of intricate interactions between genes and environment altering progressively the development of brain structures and functions. Circadian rhythms are a complex intrinsic timing system composed of almost as many clocks as there are body cells.

Impact of the Early Start Denver Model on the cognitive level of children with autism spectrum disorder: study protocol for a randomised controlled trial using a two-stage Zelen design.

Introduction: Early intervention for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in the European French-speaking countries is heterogeneous and poorly evaluated to date. Early intervention units applying the Early Start Denver Model (ESDM) for toddlers and young children with ASD have been created in France and Belgium to improve this situation. It is essential to evaluate this intervention for the political decision-making process regarding ASD interventions in European French-speaking countries.

The Child "after": between maternal Depression and Transmission of the traumatism.

Born a little time after the death of his sister, our patient, Antoine, 13 years old, was suffering from severe obsessional compulsive disorders, which needed care in the hospital and adapted treatment. We tried to know if what we were led to observe by this adolescent could be explained by works and thoughts around the notion of substitute child. Building our thought on various theoretical approaches, including neurosciences, we tried to think the psychopathological signs of this patient by two ways.

News in early intervention in autism.

Background: Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a complex neurodevelopmental trouble which prevents the child from socio-communicative interaction, and learning from his environment. Non-medical early intervention attempts to improve prognosis. We will review the main current hypothesis, intervention models and scientific supports about early intervention.

Autism as a disorder of biological and behavioral rhythms: toward new therapeutic perspectives.

There is a growing interest in the role of biological and behavioral rhythms in typical and atypical development. Recent studies in cognitive and developmental psychology have highlighted the importance of rhythmicity and synchrony of motor, emotional, and interpersonal rhythms in early development of social communication. The synchronization of rhythms allows tuning and adaptation to the external environment.

[Childhood onset schizophrenia: current data and therapeutic approach].

Childhood schizophrenia is a rare but serious developmental disorder affecting most of the fields involved in the child's adaptive functioning: motor, emotional, cognitive, and social. The clinical expression of the disorder mainly depends on the child's age and the IQ level at the time the first clinical symptoms appear. The progression of childhood schizophrenia is generally poor, with different outcome studies suggesting a continuity of the process between childhood and adulthood.

Perceiving goals and actions in individuals with autism spectrum disorders.

In the present study, we investigated the ability to parse familiar sequences of action into meaningful events in young individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs), as compared to young individuals with typical development (TD) and young individuals with moderate mental retardation or learning disabilities (MLDs). While viewing two videotaped movies, participants were requested to detect the boundary transitions between component events at both fine and coarse levels of the action hierarchical structure. Overall, reduced accuracy for event detection was found in participants with ASDs, relative to participants with TD, at both levels of action segmentation.

Psychoanalysis and social cognitive neuroscience: a new framework for a dialogue.

The fields of psychoanalysis and neuroscience use different methods of description, analysis and comprehension of reality, and because each is based on a different methodology, each approach constructs a different representation of reality. Thus, psychoanalysis could contribute to a general psychology involving neuroscience to the extent that a "psychoanalytical psychology" (the theory of mental functioning that is extrapolated from psychoanalytical practice) defines natural objects of study (mind functions) for a multidisciplinary approach. However, the so called "naturalisation" of psychoanalytical concepts (metapsychology) does not imply the reduction of these concepts to biology; rather, it suggests a search for compatibility between psychoanalytical concepts and neuroscientific description.

Predicting ensuing actions in children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders.

This study investigated the ability to predict others' action in a group of children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) (n = 18). Their performance was compared with a group of children with mental retardation (n = 13) and a group of children with typical development (n = 19). Participants were presented with short incomplete videotaped movies showing an actor executing familiar and non-familiar actions.

Impairment of self-monitoring: part of the endophenotypic risk for psychosis.

Background: A disorder of self-monitoring may underlie the positive symptoms of psychosis. The cognitive mechanisms associated with these symptoms may also be detectable in individuals at risk of psychosis.

Aims: To investigate (a) whether patients with psychosis show impaired self-monitoring, (b) to what degree this is associated with positive symptoms, and (c) whether this is associated with liability to psychotic symptoms.

Altered processing of sensorimotor feedback in schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia is characterized by an altered sense of the reality, associated with hallucinations and delusions. Some theories suggest that schizophrenia is related to a deficiency of the system that generates information about the sensory consequences of the actions realized by the subject. This system monitors the reafferent information resulting from an action and allows its anticipation.

Goal-directed action representation in autism.

The aim of the present study was to investigate the ability of individuals with autism to represent goal-directed behavioural actions. We compared the performance of subjects with autism (n=16), mentally retarded subjects (n=14) and normal healthy subjects (n=15) in a sequencing task consisted in arranging pictures of single events in their appropriate order so as to make coherent stories. Three types of actions were presented: (a) actions on objects; (b) actions on objects in a broader spatio-temporal context; (c) interactive actions.

[Emotional processes in schizophrenia: investigation of the evaluative component].

Schizophrenia is a disease that constitutes a particularly relevant way to investigate emotional processing. Indeed, major clinical signs of emotional disturbance (eg, anhedonia) suggest that some emotional mechanisms are defective in patients with schizophrenia. Evaluation can be considered as a fundamental component of the emotional system (28) and the first aim of the present study was to test the polarity hypothesis according to which different mechanisms are involved in the evaluation of positive vs negative emotional events.

Impairment in event sequencing in disorganised and non-disorganised patients with schizophrenia.

It has been suggested that thought disorder in schizophrenia is associated with impaired executive functions and with a defective understanding of others' behaviour. Action sequence knowledge processing and goal detection are considered as crucial components of executive functioning. Here, we used a picture-sequencing task to assess the ability of schizophrenic patients (n = 40) with and without disorganisation symptoms to arrange different types of action sequence representations.

Mental rotation in schizophrenia.

Motor imagery provides a direct insight into action representations. The aim of the present study was to investigate the level of impairment of action monitoring in schizophrenia by evaluating the performance of schizophrenic patients on mental rotation tasks. We raised the following questions: (1) Are schizophrenic patients impaired in motor imagery both at the explicit and at the implicit level? (2) Are body parts more difficult for them to mentally rotate than objects? (3) Is there any link between the performance and the hallucinating symptom profile? The schizophrenic patients (n = 13) displayed the same pattern of performance as the control subjects (n = 13).

Event-related potentials during rule processing in schizophrenia.

Several studies have shown that schizophrenia is characterized by impaired frontal lobe functions, functions that are responsible, for example, for the management of rules, strategic reasoning, and selective attention. Using event-related potentials (ERP), we assessed the brain's electrical activity in a group of patients with schizophrenia (n=11) and a healthy control group (n=14) during a reaction time task requiring the use of a rule. ERP waves were compared with those elicited in a similar task based on a direct sensory association.

Increased perception of loudness in autism.

Clinical reports on autism describe abnormal responses to auditory stimuli such as intolerance to sounds. The present study assessed subjective perception of loudness in subjects with autism compared to healthy controls, using two psychoacoustic tests. First, the auditory dynamic range was evaluated at six different tone frequencies.

Neural correlates of action attribution in schizophrenia.

Patients with first-rank symptoms (FRS) of schizophrenia do not experience all of their actions and personal states as their own. FRS may be associated with an impaired ability to correctly attribute an action to its origin. In the present study, we examined regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) with positron emission tomography during an action-attribution task in a group of patients with FRS.

Modulating the experience of agency: a positron emission tomography study.

This study investigated agency, the feeling of being causally involved in an action. This is the feeling that leads us to attribute an action to ourselves rather than to another person. We were interested in the effects of experimentally modulating this experience on brain areas known to be involved in action recognition and self-recognition.

[Neurodevelopmental hypothesis of schizophrenia].

Re-assembling the heterogeneic arguments in favour of organic factors (be whether genetic or early environmental exposures), the neuro-developmental hypothesis of schizophrenia proposes that the illness is due to an early insult (pre- or perinatal) that affects the development of the brain, leading to anomalies that express themselves only after the event, once cerebral maturity has been attained. The hypothesis rests on three types of arguments; neuropathological, clinical and epidemiological. We will successively examine the neuropathological observations made in post-mortem studies of the brains of affected patients and the studies in morphological neuro-imagery, then the results of research into aetiological factors, and the data concerning children susceptible to later development of the illness.

Gaze direction determination in schizophrenia.

It has been proposed that an impairment in gaze determination is responsible for the paranoid symptoms reported in schizophrenia. To address this, we examined the gaze discrimination system in schizophrenia. Thirty-two patients suffering from schizophrenia (20 patients with persecutory delusions and 12 patients without such delusions) were compared to 32 control subjects on two specific tasks.

Anticipating incoming events: an impaired cognitive process in schizophrenia.

Intentions are central to guiding actions to their completion because they generate expectations which precede the realization of a task. This ability to manage time was investigated by using a cognitive task which involves several highly integrated processes: sequential learning, explicit processing, and working memory. In this task, participants are required to explicitly learn a repeating color sequence before receiving an instruction to give an anticipatory motor response concerning the next element.