For well over 100 years, some scientists have been interested in disentangling how nature and nurture affect the development of people’s characteristics. After all, some characteristics appear uninfluenced by the contexts in which development occurs, whereas others appear very much affected by developmental environments. To choose two obvious examples, skin color appears to be little affected b...

BACKGROUND Previous studies emphasise the importance of the biological family to the welfare of fostered adolescents. However, the majority of these studies only take into consideration the viewpoints of the professionals, foster parents and biological parents, not those of the adolescents themselves. For this reason little is known about the perceptions the adolescents have and the needs they ...

Severe early childhood (S-ECC) caries has classically been studied as a disease, whose initiation and progression is determined by biological risk factors. In recent years S-ECC has begun to be associated to numerous social and psychosocial environmental conditions, one of which is parental stress. Our study set out to investigate the association of parental/caregiver stress as a co-factors to ...

In the last 5 years, the Colorado and Texas adoption projects have replicated and elaborated the findings of the classical adoption studies of this century: IQs of adoptees are more strongly related to the IQs of their biological parents than to measurable characteristics of their adoptive environment. At the same time, several studies from France have demonstrated substantial IQ gains in child...

Genetic data from polymorphic microsatellite loci were employed to estimate paternity and maternity in a local population of nine-banded armadillos (Dasypus novemcinctus) in northern Florida. The parentage assessments took advantage of maximum likelihood procedures developed expressly for situations when individuals of neither gender can be excluded a priori as candidate parents. The molecular ...

Considered biologically as well as philosophically, man is a most singular product of the evolutionary process. He receives and transmits not one but two heredities, the biological and the cultural. Man’s biological heredity is very much like that of any other organism; it is transmitted solely from parents to their children, and to other direct descendants. Cultural heredity, or simply culture...

This study examined child characteristics and family factors as predictors of stress in the biological or adoptive parents of 6- to 12-year-old children with fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASDs). Impaired executive functioning, poorer adaptive functioning, externalizing and internalizing behavior problems, and adoptive parent status all made significant and independent contributions to the ...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the prospective associations between dietary patterns in childhood and CVD risk in adolescence. DESIGN Prospective cohort study. Exposures were dietary patterns at age 7, 10 and 13 years derived by cluster analysis. Outcomes were physiological and biochemical cardiovascular risk markers. SETTING Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), UK. SUBJECT...

in 2006, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) formally recommended the use of developmental surveillance at each well child visit and the use of standardized developmental screening tools at nine, 18, and 30 (or 24) month visits. In 2007 the AAP recommended the incorporation of an autism-specific screening at the 18 and 24-month visits. In 2006 the Rhode Island Department of Health conducte...

Locus of control is one of the most widely studied concepts in the history of personality psychology. In spite of its popularity and its associations with numerous relevant outcomes, the ability of locus of control to predict future behaviors involving parenting effectiveness has been under researched. The few parent locus of control children's outcome studies are characterized by cross-section...