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<p>Prior research suggests that child temperament may play an important role in early childhood stress regulation. We compared children's diurnal cortisol and the association between cortisol and temperament in two different childcare settings. Cortisol was measured from saliva samples over 2 days in children (N = 84) attending out-of-home childcare and in children (N = 27), who were cared for at home at the age of 3.5 years. There was no difference between the childcare groups in total diurnal cortisol. However, of the individual measurements, afternoon cortisol levels were higher in the out-of-home childcare group during their childcare day when compared with their home day. Child temperament was not associated with total diurnal cortisol. Comparison with our prior measurements showed that the association between temperamental surgency/extroversion and total diurnal cortisol diminished along with the child age from 2 to 3.5 years in both childcare settings. This may indicate that more extroverted children are physiologically more reactive to environmental stimuli when they are younger, but this association does not appear as the children develop. Our results further suggest that the afternoon hours in the out-of-home childcare may be demanding and accelerate the hypothalamus–pituitary–adrenal axis activation in young children independent of their age.<br></p>...

<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 ...

The human brain develops dynamically during early childhood, when the child is sensitive to both genetic programming and extrinsic exposures. Recent studies have found links between prenatal and early life environmental ...

<p><strong>Objective: </strong>This study aimed to explore the role of alexithymia and potential sex differences in the associations between perceived parental bonding and mental health.</p><p><strong>Methods: </strong>The ...

Dental anxiety (DA) and hair cortisol concentrations (HCC) are associated with psychological symptoms and vary during pregnancy. We aimed to examine the association between HCC and DA at two points of pregnancy. Participants ...

<p>Psychological assessment scales need to be psychometrically sound, but previous research on the factorial structure of one of the most common measures of trait reactance, the Hong Psychological Reactance Scale (HPRS), ...

Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) has provided great insights into the microstructural features of the developing brain. However, DTI images are prone to several artifacts and the reliability of DTI scalars is of paramount ...

<p> </p><p><b>Objective:</b> The aim of the present study was to investigate whether anti-vaccination attitudes and behavior, and positive attitudes to complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), are driven by trait ...

Genetic variants in the oxytocin receptor (OTR) have been linked to distinct social phenotypes, psychiatric disorders and brain volume alterations in adults. However, to date, it is unknown how OTR genotype shapes prenatal ...

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....