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Ce chapitre fait un état des lieux des recherches mettant en évidence le rôle adaptatif des processus émotionnel dans les apprentissages en situation de prise de décision, de l’enfance à l’âge adulte. Ce chapitre vise également à mieux comprendre les processus émotionnels en lien avec une augmentation, ou une diminution, de la prise de risque à l’adolescence.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES The aim of this study is to see if: (i) alexithymia is associated with PG and with the severity of gambling behavior; (ii) alexithymia is associated with strategic and non-strategic gambling. METHODS Two hundred and twenty-six gamblers were recruited in different gambling locations. First, pathological gamblers (PGs) (n = 106) were compared to non-pathological gamblers (NPGs) (n = 120). Second, strategic gamblers (n = 92) were compared to non-strategic gamblers (n = 96). RESULTS After controlling for being or not depressed, PGs have significantly higher alexithymia scores. Alexithymia is positively correlated to the intensity of gambling behavior and associated with PG: being alexithymic (OR = 4.21, SEB = .32, p

Inhibitory control involves different types of inhibition processes, such as interference control and response inhibition. In an affectively neutral context, both inhibition processes develop linearly with age. In an affectively charged context, however, the development of these inhibition processes is still debated, and no study has investigated the development of the ability to inhibit an initiated motor response, such as in a stop signal task (SST), from late childhood to young adulthood. We asked children, adolescents and young adults to perform a cool or a hot version of the SST using neutral or emotional nonverbal vocalizations as stop signals. We showed that cool and hot response inhibition abilities develop linearly from late childhood to young adulthood. The development of this ability in an affectively charged context appears to be more protracted than in a neutral one. Exerting response inhibition in an affectively charged context is more challenging than in a neutral context especially during adolescence.

International audience; To determine whether the growing ability to take a third-person perspective (3PP) is explained in part by the growing ability to inhibit a first-person perspective (1PP), 10-year-old children (n = 49) and 22-year-old adults (n = 52) performed a negative priming adaptation of the own body transformation task. Both children and adults were less efficient in adopting a 1PP after they adopted a 3PP-with a smaller amplitude of the negative priming effect with older age-and adults' and children's performances in the own body transformation task were predicted in part by their Stroop interference scores. These results suggest that the growing efficiency to adopt a 3PP is rooted in part in the growing efficiency to inhibit the 1PP.

International audience; Most researchers assume that deception involves a conflict between a predominant truth response and a deliberate deceptive response. Such a view is consistent with dual process theories that state that high-order cognition operates through fast-automatic processes that may conflict with slow-deliberate ones. In the present study, we tested whether one must inhibit the truth to deceive in light of inconsistent findings in the literature. One hundred and eighty-nine participants were tested across two Negative Priming paradigms that rest on the logic that the activation of a fast-automatic process will be hampered on a given display if it is inhibited on the previous display. Our findings suggest that truthful responses are predominant in healthy adults, which is why inhibitory control is required to activate a deliberate deceptive mode. We argue that the findings from deception studies could be best accounted for by dual process theories.

We investigated whether alexithymia is at the root of the decision-making deficit classically reported in pathological gamblers.Alexithymia has been shown to be a recurrent personality trait of pathological gamblers and to impair the decision-making abilities of nonpathological gamblers, but no previous studies have investigated whether alexithymia significantly affects pathological gamblers' decision making. Although investigations of pathological gamblers typically have studied those seeking treatment, most pathological gamblers do not seek treatment. Thus, to study people representative of the general population of pathological gamblers, we conducted our study in "sportsbook" casinos with a small sample of gamblers who were not seeking treatment.We recruited gamblers in sportsbooks and classified them based on their scores on the South Oaks Gambling Screen and the Toronto Alexithymia Scale: 3 groups of pathological gamblers (6 alexithymic, 8 possibly alexithymic, and 6 nonalexithymic) and 8 healthy controls. All of the participants completed an adaptation of the Iowa Gambling Task.The alexithymic group chose less advantageously on the task than the other groups. The severity of the deficit in decision-making abilities was related to the severity of alexithymia, even when we controlled for the effects of anxiety and depression.Our findings provide preliminary evidence that alexithymia might be a critical personality trait underlying pathological gamblers' decision-making deficits.

The aim of this study is to see if: (i) alexithymia is associated with PG and with the severity of gambling behavior; (ii) alexithymia is associated with strategic and non-strategic gambling.Two hundred and twenty-six gamblers were recruited in different gambling locations. First, pathological gamblers (PGs) (n = 106) were compared to non-pathological gamblers (NPGs) (n = 120). Second, strategic gamblers (n = 92) were compared to non-strategic gamblers (n = 96).After controlling for being or not depressed, PGs have significantly higher alexithymia scores. Alexithymia is positively correlated to the intensity of gambling behavior and associated with PG: being alexithymic (OR = 4.21, SEB = .32, p .001), "difficulty identifying feelings" (OR = 1.07, SEB = .03, p = .038), and "externally-oriented thinking" (OR = 1.07, SEB = .03, p = .026) factors. Nevertheless, while alexithymia is associated with PG in strategic gamblers (being alexithymic (OR = 6.80, SEB = .50 p .001) and "difficulty identifying feelings" (OR = 1.12, SEB = .05 p = .026) factor), this is not the case in non-strategic gamblers. In the latter, only depression is associated with PG (OR = 3.43, SEB = .50 p = .013).The results highlight the importance of taking into account the gambling type in the relationship between alexithymia, depression, and PG.In non-strategic PGs, specific therapies targeting depression could be appropriate, while for strategic PGs, specific psychotherapeutic techniques like body-centered psychotherapy could help them to differentiate feelings from bodily sensations. (Am J Addict 2017;26:152-160).

International audience; Inhibitory control (i.e., the ability to resist automatisms, temptations, distractions, or interference and to adapt to conflicting situations) is a determinant of cognitive and socio‐emotional development. In light of the discrepancies of previous findings on the development of inhibitory control in affectively charged contexts, two important issues need to be addressed. We need to determine (a) whether cool inhibitory control (in affectively neutral contexts) and hot inhibitory control (in affectively charged contexts) follow the same developmental pattern and (b) the degree of specificity of these two types of inhibitory control at different ages. Thus, in the present study, we investigated the developmental patterns of cool and hot inhibitory control and the degree of specificity of these abilities in children, adolescents and adults. Typically developing children, adolescents, and adults performed two Stroop‐like tasks: an affectively neutral one (Cool Stroop task) and an affectively charged one (Hot Stroop task). In the Cool Stroop task, the participants were asked to identify the ink color of the words independent of color that the words named; in the Hot Stroop task, the participants were asked to identify the emotional expression of a face independent of the emotion named by a simultaneously displayed written word. We found that cool inhibitory control abilities develop linearly with age, whereas hot inhibitory control abilities follow a quadratic developmental pattern, with adolescents displaying worse hot inhibitory control abilities than children and adults. In addition, cool and hot inhibitory control abilities were correlated in children but not in adolescents and adults. The present study suggests (a) that cool and hot inhibitory control abilities develop differently from childhood to adulthood – i.e., that cool inhibition follows a linear developmental pattern and hot inhibition follows an adolescent‐specific pattern – and (b) that they become progressively more domain‐specific with age.

Cognitive development is generally conceived as incremental with knowledge of increasing complexity acquired throughout childhood and adolescence. However, several studies have now demonstrated not only that infants possess complex cognitive abilities but also that older children, adolescents, and adults tend to make systematic errors even in simple logical reasoning tasks. Therefore, one of the main issues for any theory of typical cognitive development is to provide an explanation of why at some age and in some contexts children, adolescents, and adults do not express a knowledge or cognitive principle that they already acquired when they were younger. In this review, we present convergent behavioural and neurocognitive evidence that cognitive development is more similar to a non-linear dynamic system than to a linear, stage-like system. In this theoretical framework, errors can emerge in problems similar to the ones infants or young children were succeeding when older children, adolescents, and adults rely on a misleading heuristic rather than on the correct logical algorithm to solve such problems. And the core mechanism for overcoming these errors is inhibitory control (i.e. the ability to inhibit the misleading heuristics). Therefore, typical cognitive development relies not only on the ability to acquire knowledge of incremental complexity but also to inhibit previously acquired knowledge.

International audience; Developmental studies using the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) or child-friendly adaptations of the IGT converged in showing that children and adolescents exhibit a strong bias in favor of disadvantageous choices whereas adults learn to decide advantageously during the course of the task. In the present article, we reviewed developmental studies that used the IGT or child-friendly adaptations of the IGT to show how these findings provide a better understanding of the processes involved in decision-making under uncertainty. For instance, developmental studies have underlined that until late adolescence, the dominant strategy is to focus only on the frequency of punishment and to choose among options with infrequent losses. Indeed, school-aged children and adolescents' choices in the IGT seem to be guided by the loss frequency leading them to fail in distinguishing between advantageous and disadvantageous options. In addition, recent developmental studies revealed that adults switch less often after losses than school-aged children and adolescents. These findings suggest that psychological tolerance to loss may facilitate learning the characteristics of each option, which in turn improves the ability to choose advantageously. In conclusion, developmental studies help us refine our understanding of decision-making.

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International audience; In this study, we tested the somatic marker hypothesis (SMH) by using an adaptation of the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) in which the emotional context associated with primary inducers was systemati- cally manipulated. In this modified version of the IGT, a picture of either a happy face or a fearful face was presented after each feedback. Critically, the expression of the face was either congruent or incongruent with the feedback delivered. Analyses of participants' choices revealed that the congruency of the emotional context with the feedback affects performance on the IGT: The ability to choose advantageously increases when the emotional context is congruent with feedback (i.e., happy faces after rewards and fearful ones after punishments), whereas this ability is impaired with an incongruent emotional context (i.e., fearful faces after rewards and happy faces after punishments). These findings provide evidence that decision making under ambiguity is driven by emotion-related signals, as postu- lated by the SMH.