It's Safe to Look: Maternal Touch Affects Infants' Fear Bias.

Touch is an extraordinary sensory, communicative, and affective experience that has cascading positive effects on infants' socio-emotional development and neurobiological functioning. This study aims to explore whether maternal touch can influence infants' well-known attentional biases toward fearful facial expressions. Visual behaviour of 7-month-old infants was measured through an eye-tracker while they were presented with an overlap task in which a central emotional face (happy, neutral, and fearful) was followed by a peripheral distractor.

The effect of psychosocial interventions on depression, anxiety, and quality of life in hemodialysis patients: a systematic review and a meta-analysis.

Purpose: Hemodialysis has become a standard therapy for adults with end-stage renal diseases. Adults undergoing hemodialysis have to cope with unique psychological issues that make their care journey particularly fatiguing. In this systematic review and meta-analysis, we aimed to summarize and evaluate the effects of psychosocial interventions on the reduction of anxiety and depression in adults with HDs.

Stress symptoms and resilience factors in children with neurodevelopmental disabilities and their parents during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Objective: This study examined the impact of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in Italy by specifically looking at the psychosocial response of children/adolescents with neurodevelopmental disabilities (NDD) and their parents, and explored which factors could potentially contribute to increasing or mitigating stress-related behaviors in children/adolescents as well as their parents' stress.

Method: An online anonymous survey was designed to investigate family demographic characteristics, COVID-19 outbreak and restriction-related variables, children/adolescents' behavioral regulation problems, parental stress, and resilience. Data were collected from 1,472 parents (83.

Mother-Infant Interaction Kinect Analysis (MIIKA): An automatic kinematic-based methodology for the investigation of interpersonal distance during early exchanges.

Interpersonal distance is a core aspect of mother-child interaction. While conventional measures based on human coders do not fully capture the dynamics of this feature, computational methods provide automatic measures which can detect even small changes and more accurate estimates both spatially and temporally. Using RGB-D sensors (Microsoft Kinect V2), the present study describes a setup to automatically examine interpersonal distance during mother-child interactions, termed Mother-Infant Interaction Kinect Analysis (MIIKA).

Glucocorticoid receptor gene (NR3C1) methylation during the first thousand days: Environmental exposures and developmental outcomes.

The first 1000 days from conception are a sensitive period for human development programming. During this period, environmental exposures may result in long-lasting epigenetic imprints that contribute to future developmental trajectories. The present review reports on the effects of adverse and protective environmental conditions occurring during the first 1000 days on glucocorticoid receptor gene (NR3C1) regulation in humans.

Does patient engagement affect IBD patients' health-related quality of life? Findings from a cross-sectional study among people with inflammatory bowel diseases.

Background: Patients diagnosed with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) are required to deal with the unpredictability of this clinical condition, which is associated with poorer health-related quality of life (HRQoL) compared to other clinical conditions. Patient engagement is currently demonstrated to relate with chronic patients' HRQoL, but few studies have been conducted among this population.

Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted among 1176 IBD patients.

WE-CARE IBD SCORE: Assessing High-quality Care From the Perspective of Patients With Inflammatory Bowel Disease.

Background And Aims: Patient-reported experience measures [PREMs] are today a core asset to orientate health care quality improvements. They are particularly relevant in clinical situations requiring frequent interactions between patients and the health care system, like inflammatory bowel disease [IBD]. Indeed, IBD chronic care requires continuous therapies, psychological interventions, and follow-ups.

Understanding the role and function of maternal touch in children with neurodevelopmental disabilities.

During the first years of life, maternal touch can serve different functions including facilitation of child's gaze orientation to faces which is a key precursor for social attention. Although children with neurodevelopmental disability (ND) may have reduced social skills, the role of maternal touch in contributing to gaze orientation to maternal face has not been explored in previous research. In the present study, we investigate the functions of maternal touch in dyads of mothers and children with ND, compared to dyads of children with typical development (TD).

Disentangling the Dyadic Dance: Theoretical, Methodological and Outcomes Systematic Review of Mother-Infant Dyadic Processes.

During the last decades, the research on mother-infant dyad has produced a great amount of data, methods and theories, which largely contributed to set a revolution in the way we look at developmental changes during infancy and childhood. Very different constructs depict the different aspects of the "dyadic dance" occurring between a mother and her infant; nonetheless, a comprehensive and consistent systematization of these concepts in a coherent theoretical landscape is still lacking. In the present work, we aim at disentangling the different theoretical and methodological definitions of 9 dyadic constructs and we highlight their effects on infants' and children developmental outcomes.

Preterm behavioral epigenetics: A systematic review.

Behavioral epigenetics is revealing new pathways that lead individuals from early adversity exposures to later-in-life detrimental outcomes. Preterm birth constitutes one of the major adverse events in human development. Preterm infants are hospitalized in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) where they are exposed to life-saving yet pain-inducing procedures and to protective care.