BACKGROUND Long term studies of cognitive development and colic have not differentiated between typical colic and prolonged crying. OBJECTIVE To evaluate whether colic and excessive crying that persists beyond 3 months is associated with adverse cognitive development. DESIGN Prospective cohort study. A sample of 561 women was enrolled in the second trimester of pregnancy. Colic and prolonge...

OBJECTIVE Excessive infant crying, or infantile colic, is a common and often stress-inducing problem for parents that can ultimately result in child abuse. From previous research it is known that maternal depression is related to excessive crying, but so far little is known about the influence of paternal depression. METHODS In a prospective, population-based study, we obtained information on...

BACKGROUND Pathological crying has been rarely reported after deep brain stimulation. The exact neural substrate is unknown, but it is often assumed that pathological crying and the pseudobulbar syndrome result from disturbances of a common neural pathway. DESIGN Case report. SETTING Tertiary referral center for neurosurgery. Patient A 48-year-old woman with advanced Parkinson disease who r...

This study examined the prevalence and correlates of pathological affect in Alzheimer's disease. A consecutive series of 103 patients with Alzheimer's disease were examined with a comprehensive psychiatric assessment that included the pathological laughing and crying scale (PLACS). Forty patients (39%) showed pathological affect: 25% showed crying episodes, and 14% showed laughing or mixed (lau...

Parents commonly seek clinicians' help for infant crying that they judge to be excessive. To date there is no independent evidence whether such babies actually cry more than average. To assess this, maternal diary and 24 hour audiotape recordings of the crying periods of 16 infants referred for excessive crying were compared with equivalent measures of a normative sample. The overall amounts of...

Sympathy crying is an odd and complex mixture of physiological and emotional phenomena. Standard psychophysiological theories of emotion cannot attribute crying to a single subdivision of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) and disagreement exists regarding the emotional origin of sympathy crying. The current experiment examines sympathy crying using functional thermal infrared imaging (FTII), a...