Children with genetic syndromes frequently have feeding problems and swallowing dysfunction as a result of the complex interactions between anatomical, medical, physiological, and behavioral factors. Feeding problems associated with genetic disorders may also cause feeding to be unpleasant, negative, or even painful because of choking, coughing,…

Objective: The purpose of this study was to empirically derive eating disorder phenotypes in a clinical sample of children and adolescents using latent profile analysis (LPA), and to compare these latent profile (LP) groups to the DSM-IV-TR eating disorder categories. Method: Eating disorder symptom data collected from 401 youth (aged 7 through 19…

Background: The maximum number of alcoholic drinks consumed in a single 24-hr period is an alcoholism-related phenotype with both face and empirical validity. It has been associated with severity of withdrawal symptoms and sensitivity to alcohol, genes implicated in alcohol metabolism, and amplitude of a measure of brain activity associated with…

The present study examined the phenotypic and genetic relationship between fluency and non-fluency-based measures of reading and mathematics performance. Participants were drawn from the Western Reserve Reading and Math Project, an ongoing longitudinal twin project of same-sex MZ and DZ twins from Ohio. The present analyses are based on…

Behaviors characteristic of autism and ADHD emerge in early childhood, yet research investigating their comorbidity has focused on older children. This study aimed to explore the nature of the relationship between autistic-like traits and ADHD behaviors in a community sample of 2-year-olds. Twins from the Boston University Twin Project (N = 312…

Background: Despite extensive efforts, the causes of autism remain unknown. Advancing paternal age has been associated with various neurodevelopmental disorders. We aim to investigate three unresolved questions: (a) What is the association between paternal age and autism spectrum disorders (ASD)?; (b) Does paternal age moderate the genetic and…

In this paper, a response is made to the assertion that discourses surrounding attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are dominated by those who choose to frame such difficulties within a biomedical paradigm, and that valid alternative explanations are often marginalised as a result. It is suggested, however, that if such a discontinuity…

The objective of this study was to analyze the process and product of handwriting among children with Neurofibromatosis Type 1 (NF1) in comparison to those of Typically Developing (TD) children. Children with NF1 are at risk for some cognitive deficits, a wide range of deficits in perceptual skills and, motor and visual-motor integration skills…

Objective: Whereas research suggests young women's beliefs about breast cancer (susceptibility/severity) and its early detection (barriers/benefits) reliably distinguish breast self-examiners from nonexaminers, this study assessed whether these impressions are interreliant, especially in the context of familial risk. Participants: The sample…

This paper examines the development and consistency of children's (4, 7, 10, and 14 years) naive concepts of inheritance using three tasks. A modified adoption task asked participants to distinguish between biological and social parentage in their predictions and explanations of the origins of different feature types (physical characteristics,…

The neurobiological mechanisms by which childhood maltreatment heightens vulnerability to psychopathology remain poorly understood. It is likely that a complex interaction between environmental experiences (including poor caregiving) and an individual's genetic make-up influence neurobiological development across infancy and childhood, which in…

Twin children from Australia, Scandinavia, and the United States were assessed for inattention, hyperactivity-impulsivity, and reading across the first 3 school years. Univariate behavior-genetic analyses indicated substantial heritability for all three variables in all years. Longitudinal analyses showed one genetic source operating across the…

Objective: As researchers make progress in understanding genetic aspects of mental illness and its treatment, psychiatrists will increasingly need to understand and interpret genetic information specific to psychiatric disorders. Little is known about the extent to which residency programs are preparing psychiatrists for this new role. This study…

Previous studies have investigated trajectories of cognitive, language and adaptive functioning in Williams syndrome (WS) but little is known about how other aspects of the Williams syndrome behavioural phenotype change across the life-span. Therefore, the present study examined age associated changes in a number of different domains of…

Autism is one of the most heritable neurodevelopmental conditions and has an early onset, with symptoms being required to be present in the first 3 years of life in order to meet criteria for the "core" disorder in the classification systems. As such, the focus on identifying a prodrome over the past 20 years has been on pre-clinical…