International audienceKey concerns about the psychometric properties of the 25-item version of the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) have consistently been raised in the literature. The present study aimed at examining the meaningfulness of an alternative model to the SDQ in which 7 problematic items are excluded. French-speaking parents of 262 boys and 263 girls aged 6 to 16 years completed the SDQ. Through confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs), results provided support for a new, reduced, and psychometrically sound version of the SDQ called SDQ-R that displayed good factorial validity, construct validity, reliability, and multi-group invariance across gender. Overall, the attractive features of the SDQ-R make it a promising instrument for quickly screening emotional and behavioral problems in children and adolescents

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This study explores the development of strategic behaviour related to kindness and intelligence dimensions in 3-to 8-year-old children. Previous research systematically highlighted the affective bias that limited young children's thinking and behaving in strategic terms. We argue that young children are able to grasp specific dimensions of social affordances from personality traits and behaviour exemplifying these traits. The results obtained in the partner choice paradigm revealed a developmental increase in social utility understanding. This supports our hypothesis of early social affordances understanding and provides empirical evidence that affective bias did not drastically influence strategic partner choice in 4-to 8-year-old children.

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Summary : The ecological approach to social cognition and its impact on the conception of personality traits During the eighties and nineties, researchers in cognitive, developmental and social psychology became increasingly interested in the ecological approach to visual perception proposed by James J. Gibson (1950, 1966, 1979). This approach is founded on the concepts of direct perception and affordances. The goal of this paper is to justify, from a theoretical point of view, the extension of the affordance concept to the field of cognition, especially social cognition. In the first part, we set out the broad outlines of the ecological approach to perception, its origins and basic concepts, as well as some theoretical and empirical studies based upon this approach in developmental psychology. The second part deals with the extension ofthe ecological approach to social cognition. First, we state four principles ofthe ecological approach to social perception as formulated by Mc Arthur and Baron (1983), and then review the empirical research conducted by defenders of the ecological position. Finally, we present arguments infavour of the extension of the affordance concept to the field of cognition. The concluding sections are devoted to the conception of personality traits as affordances and the summary of empirical evidence supporting this view. The implications of an ecological conception of personality traits are discussed. Key words : perception, social cognition, affordances, personality traits.