Relations between bedtime parenting behaviors and temperament across 14 cultures.

Objectives: The present study examined parental sleep-supporting practices during toddlerhood in relation to temperament across 14 cultures. We hypothesized that passive sleep-supporting techniques (e.g.

The porridge-like framework: A multidimensional guidance to support parents of children with developmental disabilities.

Parents of children with developmental disabilities face many daily challenges that can lead to emotional and affective problems, difficulties in caregiving, and partial mental representations about themselves and their children. The multi-faceted nature of these parents' needs requires a multi-component approach that should include the analysis of priority support goals and the planning of tailored therapeutic actions. Despite different types of validated interventions are available, the choice of the most appropriate strategy to pursue a family-centered approach to support parents of infants with developmental disabilities is not obvious.

Premature birth affects visual body representation and body schema in preterm children.

Research has demonstrated that from the first six months of life infants show early sensitivity to body visual features and rely on sensorimotor and proprioceptive inputs in forming representations of their own bodies. Premature birth interferes with typical exposition to visual, sensorimotor and proprioceptive stimulation, thus presumably affecting the development of body representations. Here, we tested this hypothesis by comparing the performance of preterm children with that of age-matched full-termchildren in two tasks assessing, respectively, visual body processing and body schema.

Evidence and Open Questions for the Use of Video-Feedback Interventions With Parents of Children With Neurodevelopmental Disabilities.

The Video-Feedback Intervention (VFI) is a technique aimed at promoting positive parenting that has been found to be supportive of child development and parent-child interaction in different at-risk and clinical populations. The application of VFI with parents of children with neurodevelopmental disabilities (ND; e.g.

Mothers' and fathers' early tactile contact behaviors during triadic and dyadic parent-infant interactions immediately after birth and at 3-months postpartum: Implications for early care behaviors and intervention.

Mothers' and fathers' touch were investigated during their first naturalistic interaction with their newborns, and maternal touch was predicted from newborn to 3-months postpartum during the Still-Face (SF) procedure. Both parents displayed more nurturing types of touch when interacting with their infants for the first time. Maternal touch at newborn predicted maternal touch after, but not before, the SF 3-months later; more touch after birth was associated with more soothing, regulating, types of maternal touch following the SF, suggesting that the nature of these interactive contexts (post-birth, post-SF) may be parallel.

Early Brain Damage Affects Body Schema and Person Perception Abilities in Children and Adolescents with Spastic Diplegia.

Early brain damage leading to cerebral palsy is associated to core motor impairments and also affects cognitive and social abilities. In particular, previous studies have documented specific alterations of perceptual body processing and motor cognition that are associated to unilateral motor deficits in hemiplegic patients. However, little is known about spastic diplegia (SpD), which is characterized by motorial deficits involving both sides of the body and is often associated to visuospatial, attentional, and social perception impairments.

More than words: methodological potentials of graphical elicitation with parents of preterm infants.

Background: Word-based tools, such as interviews, can only partially provide access to the lived experience of parents of preterm infants. This study explores the lived experience of parents of preterm infants between 3 and 6 months after discharge by means of visual method (i.e.

Exploring the EEG mu rhythm associated with observation and execution of a goal-directed action in 14-month-old preterm infants.

Electroencephalographic mu rhythm desynchronization is thought to reflect Mirror Neuron System (MNS) activity and represents an important neural correlate of the coupling between action execution and perception. It is still unclear if the MNS in human ontogeny is already available at the beginning of postnatal life and how early experience impacts its development. Premature birth provides a "natural condition" for investigating the effects of early, atypical extra-uterine experience on MNS.

The dual nature of hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis regulation in dyads of very preterm infants and their mothers.

The co-regulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis in mother-infant dyads is thought to be key for infant and child development. Nonetheless, previous literature presents some inconsistencies that might at least partially be due to the presence of risk conditions and the use of different statistical approaches to measure HPA axis co-regulation. Very preterm (VPT) birth represents one of these risk conditions as the early foundation of mother-infant interaction is disrupted.

NICU Network Neurobehavioral Scale: 1-month normative data and variation from birth to 1 month.

BackgroundThe Neonatal Intensive Care Unit Network Neurobehavioral Scale (NNNS) is a standardized method for infant neurobehavioral assessment. Normative values are available for newborns, but the NNNS is not always feasible at birth. Unfortunately, 1-month NNNS normative data are lacking.

The Face-to-Face Still-Face (FFSF) Paradigm in Clinical Settings: Socio-Emotional Regulation Assessment and Parental Support With Infants With Neurodevelopmental Disabilities.

The Face-to-Face Still-Face (FFSF) paradigm is a well-acknowledged procedure to assess socio-emotional regulation in healthy and at-risk infants. Although it was developed mainly for research purposes, the FFSF paradigm has potential clinical implications for the assessment of socio-emotional regulation of infants with neurodevelopmental disabilities (ND) and to supporting parenting. The present paper describes the application of the FFSF paradigm as an evaluation and intervention tool in clinical practice with infants with ND and their parents.

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.

The BDNF polymorphism and individual differences in temperament in 4-month-old infants: A pilot study.

Individual differences in infants' temperament are under genetic control. We investigated the association between brain-derived-neurotrophic-factor (BDNF) polymorphism and temperament in 63 full-term infants. Met-carriers (N=25) had lower Regulatory capacities compared to val-homozygotes (N=38).

microRNAs differentially modulated in response to heat and drought stress in durum wheat cultivars with contrasting water use efficiency.

Plant stress response is a complex molecular process based on transcriptional and posttranscriptional regulation of many stress-related genes. microRNAs are the best-studied class of small RNAs known to play key regulatory roles in plant response to stress, besides being involved in plant development and organogenesis. We analyzed the leaf miRNAome of two durum wheat cultivars (Cappelli and Ofanto) characterized by a contrasting water use efficiency, exposed to heat stress, and mild and severe drought stress.

Does quality of developmental care in NICUs affect health-related quality of life in 5-y-old children born preterm?

Background: Preterm birth and Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) stay are early adverse experiences, which may affect health-related quality of life (HRQoL) even in the absence of prematurity-related morbidities. The aim of this multicenter longitudinal study was to examine the relation between quality levels of NICU Developmental Care (DC) and HRQoL at 60 mo in children who were born preterm.

Methods: HRQoL of 102 very preterm (VPT) children from 20 NICUs and 110 full-term controls was assessed using TNO-AZL Preschool Children's Quality of Life Questionnaire (TAPQOL).

Pain-related stress in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit and salivary cortisol reactivity to socio-emotional stress in 3-month-old very preterm infants.

Very preterm (VPT) infants are hospitalized in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) and exposed to varying levels of skin-breaking procedures (pain-related stress), even in absence of severe clinical conditions. Repeated and prolonged pain exposure may alter hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis reactivity in VPT infants. During the post-discharge period, altered HPA axis reactivity has been documented in response to non-social stressors, using salivary cortisol as a biomarker.

Cytoplasmic genome substitution in wheat affects the nuclear-cytoplasmic cross-talk leading to transcript and metabolite alterations.

Background: Alloplasmic lines provide a unique tool to study nuclear-cytoplasmic interactions. Three alloplasmic lines, with nuclear genomes from Triticum aestivum and harboring cytoplasm from Aegilops uniaristata, Aegilops tauschii and Hordeum chilense, were investigated by transcript and metabolite profiling to identify the effects of cytoplasmic substitution on nuclear-cytoplasmic signaling mechanisms.

Results: In combining the wheat nuclear genome with a cytoplasm of H.

A Survey of MicroRNA Length Variants Contributing to miRNome Complexity in Peach (Prunus Persica L.).

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are short non-coding RNA molecules produced from hairpin structures and involved in gene expression regulation with major roles in plant development and stress response. Although each annotated miRNA in miRBase (www.mirbase.

On the complexity of miRNA-mediated regulation in plants: novel insights into the genomic organization of plant miRNAs.

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are endogenous small non-coding RNAs of about 20-24 nt, known to play key roles in post-transcriptional gene regulation, that can be coded either by intergenic or intragenic loci. Intragenic (exonic and intronic) miRNAs can exert a role in the transcriptional regulation and RNA processing of their host gene. Moreover, the possibility that the biogenesis of exonic miRNAs could destabilize the corresponding protein-coding transcript and reduce protein synthesis makes their characterization very intriguing and suggests a possible novel mechanism of post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression.

Assessment of the relative toxicity of Cu2+ by measuring structural changes of supercoiled DNA.

A method for the measurement of the relative toxicity of Cu2+ in aquatic environments is proposed. It is based on the quantitative measurement on the shape change of the supercoiled DNA after it is contacted with different levels of Cu2+ for various time intervals. In the absence of any redox reagents, all supercoiled DNA degraded into other forms of DNA after 24h incubation in the presence of 5.

Evidence for declining levels of heavy-metals in the Severn Estuary and Bristol Channel, U.K. and their spatial distribution in sediments.

Levels of heavy-metals (Cd, Cu, Cr, Ni, Pb and Zn) in suspended particulate and in surface and subsurface sediments were determined at seven locations in the Severn Estuary and Bristol Channel. Sediment metal concentrations were highest at sites close to industrial centres but levels have decreased significantly over the last 30 years so that they are now close to, or meet, environmental quality guidelines. The greatest metal concentrations in deposited sediments were usually associated with the finest particulates at locations with muddy sediments, but this was not always true at sites with predominantly sandy sediments.