Hae
Aineistot 11-20 / 25
Sleep during infancy, inhibitory control and working memory in toddlers: findings from the FinnBrain cohort study
<div><h3>Background</h3><p>Sleep difficulties are associated with impaired executive functions (EFs) in school-aged children. However, much less is known about how sleep during infancy relates to EF in infants and toddlers. The aim of this study was to investigate whether parent-reported sleep patterns at 6 and 12 months were associated with their inhibitory control (IC) and working memory (WM) performances at 30 months.</p><h3>Methods</h3><p>This study included children whose parents filled in a sleep questionnaire at 6 or 12 months and who participated in the development assessment at 30 months (initial available sample at 30 months; N = 472). The final sample comprised (a) 359 infants with IC task and sleep questionnaire at 6 months and 322 toddlers at 12 months and (b) 364 infants with WM task and sleep questionnaire at 6 months and 327 toddlers at 12 months. Nighttime, daytime and total sleep duration, frequency of night awakenings, time awake at night, and proportion of daytime sleep were assessed at 6 and 12 months using the Brief Infant Sleep Questionnaire. IC at 30 months was measured using a modified version of the Snack Delay task, and WM was measured at 30 months using the Spin the Pots task. Further, children were divided into three groups (i.e., “poor sleepers”, “intermediate sleepers”, and “good sleepers”) based on percentile cut-offs (i.e., <10th, 10th–90th and > 90th percentiles) to obtain a comprehensive understanding of the direction and nature of the associations between sleep and EF in early childhood.</p><h3>Results</h3><p>Our results showed an inverted U-shaped association between proportion of daytime sleep at 12 months and IC at 30 months, indicating that average proportions of daytime sleep were longitudinally associated with better IC performance. Furthermore, a linear relation between time awake at night at 12 months and WM at 30 months was found, with more time awake at night associating with worse WM.</p><h3>Conclusions</h3><p>Our findings support the hypothesis that sleep disruption in early childhood is associated with the development of later EF and suggest that various sleep difficulties at 12 months distinctively affect WM and IC in toddlers, possibly in a nonlinear manner.<br></p></div>...
The role of alexithymia and perceived stress in mental health responses to COVID-19: A conditional process model
<p><strong>Background</strong><br>Little is known about the psychological mechanisms underlying the mental health problems related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Hypothetically, perceived stress and alexithymia may be factors ...
Human milk cortisol concentration predicts experimentally induced infant fear reactivity: moderation by infant sex
<p>Little consideration has been given to the possibility of human infant development being shaped via lactocrine programming, and by breast milk cortisol levels specifically. Despite animal models indicating that ...
Infant fecal microbiota composition and attention to emotional faces
The gut microbiota has been suggested to influence neurodevelopment in
rodents. Preliminary human studies have associated fecal microbiota
composition with features of emotional and cognitive development as well
as differences in thalamus-amygdala connectivity. Currently,
microbiota-gut-brain axis studies cover heterogenous set of infant and
child brain developmental phenotypes, while microbiota associations with
more fine-grained aspects of brain development remain largely unknown.
Here (N = 122, 53% boys), we investigated the associations
between infant fecal microbiota composition and infant attention to
emotional faces, as bias for faces is strong in infancy and deviations
in early processing of emotional facial expressions may influence the
trajectories of social-emotional development. The fecal microbiota
composition was assessed at 2.5 months of age and analyzed with 16S rRNA
gene sequencing. Attention to emotional faces was assessed with an
age-appropriate face-distractor paradigm, using neutral, happy, fearful,
and scrambled faces and salient distractors, at 8 months of age. We
observed an association between a lower abundance of Bifidobacterium and a higher abundance of Clostridium
with an increased “fear bias,” that is, attention toward fearful versus
happy/neutral faces. This data suggests an association between early
microbiota and later fear bias, a well-established infant phenotype of
emotionally directed attention. However, the clinical significance or
causality of our findings remains to be assessed....
The Stability of Early Developing Attentional Bias for Faces and Fear From 8 to 30 and 60 Months in the FinnBrain Birth Cohort Study
Most infants exhibit an attentional bias for faces and fearful facial expressions. These biases reduce toward the third year of life, but little is known about the development of the biases beyond early childhood. We used ...
The role of TPH2 variant rs4570625 in shaping infant attention to social signals
<p>TPH2, the rate-limiting enzyme in the synthesis of serotonin, has been connected to several psychiatric outcomes. Its allelic variant, rs4570625, has been found to relate to individual differences in cognitive and emotion ...
Associations between observed and reported infant negative affectivity, fear and self-regulation, and early communicative development-Evidence from the FinnBrain Birth Cohort Study
Self-regulation and language are intertwined abilities, but the nature of their relations in early childhood when both skills are still emerging is insufficiently understood. Our knowledge of the relations between early ...
Newborn left amygdala volume associates with attention disengagement from fearful faces at eight months
<p>After 5 months of age, infants begin to prioritize attention to fearful over other facial expressions. One key proposition is that amygdala and related early-maturing subcortical network, is important for emergence of this attentional bias – however, empirical data to support these assertions are lacking. In this prospective longitudinal study, we measured amygdala volumes from MR images in 65 healthy neonates at 2–5 weeks of gestation corrected age and attention disengagement from fearful vs. non-fearful facial expressions at 8 months with eye tracking. Overall, infants were less likely to disengage from fearful than happy/neutral faces, demonstrating an age-typical bias for fear. Left, but not right, amygdala volume (corrected for intracranial volume) was positively associated with the likelihood of disengaging attention from fearful faces to a salient lateral distractor (r = .302, p = .014). No association was observed with the disengagement from neutral or happy faces in equivalent conditions (r = .166 and .125, p = .186 and .320, respectively). These results are the first to link the amygdala volume with the emerging perceptual vigilance for fearful faces during infancy. They suggest a link from the prenatally defined variability in the amygdala size to early postnatal emotional and social traits.<br /></p>...
The Connection and Development of Unpredictability and Sensitivity in Maternal Care Across Early Childhood
<p>Both patterns of maternal sensory signals and sensitive care have shown to be crucial elements shaping child development. However, research concerning these aspects of maternal care has focused mainly on maternal ...