Nathalie Fontaine - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Nathalie Fontaine

Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 2012

Theory of Mind (ToM) is the ability to attribute thoughts, intentions and beliefs to others. This... more Theory of Mind (ToM) is the ability to attribute thoughts, intentions and beliefs to others. This involves component processes, including cognitive perspective taking (cognitive ToM) and understanding emotions (affective ToM). This study assessed the distinction and overlap of neural processes involved in these respective components, and also investigated their development between adolescence and adulthood. While data suggest that ToM develops between adolescence and adulthood, these populations have not been compared on cognitive and affective ToM domains. Using fMRI with 15 adolescent (aged 11-16 years) and 15 adult (aged 24-40 years) males, we assessed neural responses during cartoon vignettes requiring cognitive ToM, affective ToM or physical causality comprehension (control). An additional aim was to explore relationships between fMRI data and self-reported empathy. Both cognitive and affective ToM conditions were associated with neural responses in the classic ToM network acro...

Sexologies, 2018

SEXOL-664; No. of Pages xxx.e2 N.M.G. Fontaine et al. collected from a sample of female heterosex... more SEXOL-664; No. of Pages xxx.e2 N.M.G. Fontaine et al. collected from a sample of female heterosexual university students (n = 274; mean age, 22.9 years). The participants completed the Multidimensional Inventory of Development, Sex and Aggression (MIDSA; Knight, 2007). The findings suggest that women who had behaviour problems in childhood and adolescence tend to use sexual coercion to a greater extent than women without a history of behaviour problems. Moreover, the findings suggest that women who use sexual coercion are also prone to resort to psychological aggression toward a partner during a disagreement. These findings highlight the importance of taking into account the history of behaviour problems across the life-course in the development of theoretical models of female sexual coercion.

Archives of General Psychiatry, 2012

Juvenile and Family Court Journal

Behavior Research Methods

This article presents the development of the "Hoosier Vocal Emotions Corpus," a stimulus set of r... more This article presents the development of the "Hoosier Vocal Emotions Corpus," a stimulus set of recorded pseudo-words based on the pronunciation rules of English. The corpus contains 73 controlled audio pseudo-words uttered by two actresses in five different emotions (i.e., happiness, sadness, fear, anger, and disgust) and in a neutral tone, yielding 1,763 audio files. In this article, we describe the corpus as well as a validation study of the pseudo-words. A total of 96 native English speakers completed a forced choice emotion identification task. All emotions were recognized better than chance overall, with substantial variability among the different tokens. All of the recordings, including the ambiguous stimuli, are made freely available, and the recognition rates and the full confusion matrices for each stimulus are provided in order to assist researchers and clinicians in the selection of stimuli. The corpus has unique characteristics that can be useful for experimental paradigms that require controlled stimuli (e.g., electroencephalographic or fMRI studies). Stimuli from this corpus could be used by researchers and clinicians to answer a variety of questions, including investigations of emotion processing in individuals with certain temperamental or behavioral characteristics associated with difficulties in emotion recognition (e.g., individuals with psychopathic traits); in bilingual individuals or nonnative English speakers; in patients with aphasia, schizophrenia, or other mental health disorders (e.g., depression); or in training automatic emotion recognition algorithms. The Hoosier Vocal Emotions Corpus is available at https:// psycholinguistics.indiana.edu/hoosiervocalemotions.htm.

Journal of Criminal Justice

Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology

Callous-unemotional (CU) traits (e.g., lack of empathy, lack of guilt, shallow affect) are associ... more Callous-unemotional (CU) traits (e.g., lack of empathy, lack of guilt, shallow affect) are associated with severe and persistent conduct problems in youth. There is evidence showing a substantial genetic correlation between CU traits and conduct problems. The etiological associations between CU traits and other psychopathological symptoms, including symptoms of hyperactivity and emotional problems (such as anxiety and depression symptoms), have been less explored. To examine the etiological associations between CU traits and symptoms of conduct problems, hyperactivity and emotional problems separately through the use of a twin design. Participants were same-sex twin pairs (n = 426 twins; 42% female; 43% MZ; age = 15) drawn from the Child and Adolescents Twin Study in Sweden, a longitudinal study of twins born in Sweden. The sample was mainly composed of children who screenpositive on neurodevelopmental problems/mental health problems or at-risk children (i.e., screen-negative children considered to be genetically at-risk siblings). We used self-report measures of CU traits, conduct problems, hyperactivity and emotional problems. Model-fitting analyses were conducted using structural equation modeling. We found a strong positive genetic correlation between CU traits and conduct problems and a moderate genetic correlation between CU traits and hyperactivity. We also found a relatively modest, but significant negative genetic correlation between CU traits and emotional problems. Using a sample of adolescent twins screened for neurodevelopmental problems, we replicated previous findings that showed a strong genetic correlation between CU traits and conduct problems and we extended research by examining further the etiological associations between CU traits and symptoms of hyperactivity and emotional problems.

Child Psychiatry & Human Development

Developmental science, Jan 8, 2017

Callous-unemotional (CU) traits are characterized by a lack of guilt and empathy, and low respons... more Callous-unemotional (CU) traits are characterized by a lack of guilt and empathy, and low responsiveness to distress and fear in others. Children with CU traits are at-risk for engaging in early and persistent conduct problems. Individuals showing CU traits have been shown to have reduced neural responses to others' distress (e.g., fear). However, the neural components of distress responses in children with CU traits have not been investigated in early childhood. In the current study, we examined neural responses that underlie the processing of emotionally valenced vocal stimuli using the event-related potential technique in a group of preschoolers. Participants between 2 and 5 years old took part in an auditory oddball task containing English-based pseudowords spoken with either a fearful, happy, or a neutral prosody while electroencephalography data were collected. The mismatch negativity (MMN) component, an index of the automatic detection of deviant stimuli within a series o...

Purpose: Variability in the timing of infant developmental milestones is poorly understood. We us... more Purpose: Variability in the timing of infant developmental milestones is poorly understood. We used a twin analysis to estimate genetic and environmental influences on motor development and activity levels in infancy. Method: Data were from the Gemini Study, a twin birth cohort of 2,402 families with 10 twins born in the United Kingdom in 2007. Parents reported motor activity level for each of the twins at age 3 months using the Revised Infant Behavior Rating Scale and reported the ages at which they first sat unsupported, crawled, and walked unaided. Results: Activity level at 3 months and ages when first sitting and crawling were about equally influenced by the shared family environment (45%-54%) and genes (45%-48%). Genetic influences dominated for age when children took their first independent 15 steps (84%). Conclusion: Aspects of the shared family environment appear to be important influences on motor activity levels and early milestones, although the timing of walking may have a stronger genetic influence. Further research to identify the specific environmental and genetic factors that promote early activity may be important for longer-term health outcomes.

Journal of Criminal Justice, 2016

Aggressive Behavior, Mar 1, 2010

An experimental preventive intervention nested into a longitudinal study was used to test the dev... more An experimental preventive intervention nested into a longitudinal study was used to test the developmental distinctiveness of proactive and reactive aggression. The randomized multimodal preventive intervention targeted a subsample of boys rated disruptive by their teachers. These boys were initially part of a sample of 895 boys, followed from kindergarten to 17 years of age. Semiparametric analyses of developmental trajectories for self-reported proactive and reactive aggression (between 13 and 17 years of age) indicated three trajectories for each type of aggression that varied in size and shape (Low, Moderate, and High Peaking). Intentto-treat comparisons between the boys in the prevention group and the control group confirmed that the preventive intervention between 7 and 9 years of age, which included parenting skills and social skills training, could impact the development of reactive more than proactive aggression. The intervention effect identified in reactive aggression was related to a reduction in self-reported coercive parenting. The importance of these results for the distinction between subtypes of aggressive behaviors and the value of longitudinalexperimental studies from early childhood onward is discussed.

Journal of clinical child and adolescent psychology : the official journal for the Society of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, American Psychological Association, Division 53, Jan 18, 2016

Callous-unemotional (CU) traits (e.g., lack of empathy and guilt) differentiate a group of childr... more Callous-unemotional (CU) traits (e.g., lack of empathy and guilt) differentiate a group of children at particularly high risk for engaging in aggressive behavior, notably bullying. However, little is known about whether youths with CU traits are at risk for being victimized by their peers. We examined the associations between trajectories of CU traits in childhood (between 7 and 12 years old) and peer victimization in adolescence (14 years old). The participants were drawn from the Twins Early Development Study, a longitudinal population-based study of twins born in England and in Wales. The trajectories of CU traits (i.e., stable high, increasing, decreasing and stable low) were identified through general growth mixture modeling. Four forms of peer victimization were considered: physical victimization, verbal victimization, social manipulation, and attacks on property. We found that youths with stable high levels, increasing levels, and decreasing levels of CU traits in childhood h...

Criminal Behaviour and Mental Health, 2014

Little is known about the associations between self-reported offending and official offending whi... more Little is known about the associations between self-reported offending and official offending whilst considering different types of offences. The aims of the present study are to identify developmental trajectories of self-reported violent and nonviolent offending (SRVO; SRNVO) and to examine their associations with official violent and nonviolent offences (as juveniles and adults). Developmental trajectories of SRVO and SRNVO from 11 to 17 years of age were estimated with data from the Montreal Longitudinal and Experimental Study, a prospective longitudinal study of 1037 boys from disadvantaged neighbourhoods. Five trajectories of SRVO (i.e. Chronic, Desisting, Delayed, Moderate and Low) and three trajectories of SRNVO (Chronic, Moderate and Low) were identified. Chronic, Desisting and Delayed trajectories of SRVO were associated with violent and nonviolent official offending in adolescence and early adulthood, over and above the trajectories of SRNVO. In comparison, trajectories of SRNVO were weakly and inconsistently associated with official offending, once controlling for their overlap with trajectories of SRVO. Individuals on high trajectories of violent offending during adolescence are most at risk for being exposed to the justice system both concurrently and longitudinally. Differentiating violent and nonviolent offending can help resolve part of the discordance between self-reported and official offending.

ABSTRACT This article examined the link between behavior problems in childhood and adolescence an... more ABSTRACT This article examined the link between behavior problems in childhood and adolescence and self-reported physical violence toward and from partner in early adulthood. Participants were young women (n = 705) from the province of Québec who participated in a longitudinal study from age 6 to 21. Results indicated a significant link between behavior problems and physical violence perpetrated by women, even after controlling for physical violence in the family of origin (i.e., violence between parents and violence against the participants).

Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 2012

Abstract 1. Psychopathy has been a sustained interest among psychologists and, to a lesser extent... more Abstract 1. Psychopathy has been a sustained interest among psychologists and, to a lesser extent, among criminologists. Studies on psychopathy have tended to focus on its measurement and predictive ability, primarily in adolescence and primarily among more serious offenders. This article moves beyond prior research on psychopathy and is the first to link childhood risk factors and offending trajectories measured through age 40 to psychopathy at age 48 in a community sample of several hundred South London males in ...

Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 2008

Objective: To estimate trajectories of bullying and victimization in early to mid-adolescence, as... more Objective: To estimate trajectories of bullying and victimization in early to mid-adolescence, associations between the trajectories, and links with delinquency and self-harm. Method: A total of 3,932 adolescents (50% boys) reported bullying (ages 14 to 16), victimization (ages 13 to 16), delinquency (age 16), and self-harm (age 16). Results: Two bullying trajectories (low/decreasing, high/increasing) and three victimization trajectories (low, high/decreasing, high/increasing) were identified. Over time, victimization increased the likelihood of involvement in bullying to a greater extent than bullying increased the likelihood of victimization. Boys and girls in the high/increasing bullying and the low or high/increasing victimization trajectories (i.e., the bullies and the bully-victims) were highest in mid-adolescent delinquency. Girls following the high/increasing bullying and high/increasing victimization trajectories (bully-victims) were the highest in mid-adolescent self-harm. Conclusions: Youths who are victimized by their peers are at increased risk, in turn, of victimizing others. Sex-specific adjustment problems are associated with differing patterns of involvement in bullying and victimization among adolescents.