Future Implications of Artificial Intelligence in Medical Education.

Artificial intelligence has experienced explosive growth in the past year that will have implications in all aspects of our lives, including medicine. In order to train a physician workforce that understands these new advancements, medical educators must take steps now to ensure that physicians are adequately trained in medical school, residency, and fellowship programs to become proficient in the usage of artificial intelligence in medical practice. This manuscript discusses the various considerations that leadership within medical training programs should be mindful of when deciding how to best integrate artificial intelligence into their curricula.

Rethinking gut microbiome residency and the Enterobacteriaceae in healthy human adults.

Longitudinal human gut microbiome datasets generated using community-level, sequence-based approaches often report a sub-set of long-lived "resident" taxa that rarely, if ever, are lost. This result contrasts with population-level turnover of resident clones on the order of months to years. We hypothesized that the disconnect between these results is due to a relative lack of simultaneous discrimination of the human gut microbiome at both the community and population-levels.

Early student (dis)engagement: Contributions of household chaos, parenting, and self-regulatory skills.

Previous studies suggest that the roots of school dropout (a) can be established early in life, (b) are likely to involve multilevel factors (home, child, classroom) operating prior to and during the elementary school years, and (c) can be identified by 3rd grade. The decision to drop out of school is thus a dynamic developmental process that can begin with disengagement in elementary school. Yet few studies have examined the multilevel factors that might contribute to children's early disengagement from school.

Bidirectional Linkages between Emotion Recognition and Problem Behaviors in Elementary School Children.

Cross-sectional studies support negative associations between children's skills in recognizing emotional expressions and their problem behaviors. Few studies have examined these associations over time, however, precluding our understanding of the direction of effects. Emotion recognition difficulties may contribute to the development of problem behaviors; additionally, problem behaviors may constrain the development of emotion recognition skill.

Emotion Recognition Deficits among Children with Conduct Problems and Callous-Unemotional Behaviors.

Deficits in emotion recognition have been associated with psychopathic and callous-unemotional (CU) behaviors among adults, adolescents, and children. However, few previous studies have examined such associations exclusively during early and middle childhood, or demographic differences in emotion recognition that may result from early emotion socialization experiences. The current study used a large, population-stratified, randomly-selected sample of 2 grade children living in areas of high rural poverty to examine group differences in emotion recognition among children showing no conduct problems or CU behaviors (typical), conduct problems without CU behaviors (CP-only), and both CP and CU behaviors (CP+CU).

A Three-factor Structure of Emotion Understanding in Third-grade Children.

Theoretical conceptualizations of emotion understanding generally imply a two-factor structure comprised of recognition of emotional expressions and understanding emotion-eliciting situations. We tested this structure in middle childhood and then explored the unique predictive value of various facets of emotion understanding in explaining children's socioemotional competence. Participants were 201 third-grade children and their mothers.

The interplay among socioeconomic status, household chaos, and parenting in the prediction of child conduct problems and callous-unemotional behaviors.

Child conduct problems (CP) reflect a heterogeneous collection of oppositional, aggressive, norm-violating, and sometimes violent behaviors, whereas child callous-unemotional (CU) behaviors reflect interpersonal styles of interactions reflecting a lack of guilt and empathy as well as uncaring and shallow emotional responses to others. Taken together, high levels of child CP and CU behaviors are thought to identify a relatively homogenous group of children at elevated risk for persistent and more severe problem behaviors across childhood and into adulthood. Although a large body of research has examined the developmental etiology of CP behaviors, only recently has a developmental psychopathology approach been applied to early CU behaviors.

The role of household chaos in understanding relations between early poverty and children's academic achievement.

The following prospective longitudinal study used an epidemiological sample ( = 1,236) to consider the potential mediating role of early cumulative household chaos (6-58 months) on associations between early family income poverty (6 months) and children's academic achievement in kindergarten. Two dimensions of household chaos, disorganization and instability, were examined as mediators. Results revealed that, in the presence of household disorganization (but not instability) and relevant covariates, income poverty was no longer directly related to academic achievement.

Classroom Quality at Pre-kindergarten and Kindergarten and Children's Social Skills and Behavior Problems.

Focusing on the continuity in the quality of classroom environments as children transition from preschool into elementary school, this study examined the associations between classroom quality in pre-kindergarten and kindergarten and children's social skills and behavior problems in kindergarten and first grade. Participants included 1175 ethnically-diverse children (43% African American) living in low-wealth rural communities of the US. Results indicated that children who experienced higher levels of emotional and organizational classroom quality in both pre-kindergarten and kindergarten demonstrated better social skills and fewer behavior problems in both kindergarten and first grade comparing to children who did not experience higher classroom quality.

Predictors of behavioral regulation in kindergarten: Household chaos, parenting, and early executive functions.

Behavioral regulation is an important school readiness skill that has been linked to early executive function (EF) and later success in learning and school achievement. Although poverty and related risks, as well as negative parenting, have been associated with poorer EF and behavioral regulation, chaotic home environments may also play a role in understanding both early EF and later behavioral regulation at school age. To explore these relationships, a unique longitudinal and representative sample was used of 1,292 children born to mothers who lived in low-wealth rural America who were followed from birth into early elementary school.

Household Chaos and Children's Cognitive and Socio-Emotional Development in Early Childhood: Does Childcare Play a Buffering Role?

Evidence suggests that household chaos is associated with less optimal child outcomes. Yet, there is an increasing indication that children's experiences in childcare may buffer them against the detrimental effects of such environments. Our study aims were to test: (1) whether children's experiences in childcare mitigated relations between household chaos and children's cognitive and social development, and (2) whether these (conditional) chaos effects were mediated by links between chaos and executive functioning.

Maternal emotion socialization differentially predicts third-grade children's emotion regulation and lability.

Numerous parental emotion socialization factors have been implicated as direct and indirect contributors to the development of children's emotional competence. To date, however, no study has combined parents' emotion-related beliefs, behaviors, and regulation strategies in one model to assess their cumulative-as well as unique-contributions to children's emotion regulation. We considered the 2 components that have recently been distinguished: emotion regulation and emotional lability.

The mediating role of parenting in the associations between household chaos and children's representations of family dysfunction.

Children's drawings are thought to reflect their mental representations of self and their interpersonal relations within families. Household chaos is believed to disrupt key proximal processes related to optimal development. The present study examines the mediating role of parenting behaviors in the relations between two measures of household chaos, instability and disorganization, and how they may be evidenced in children's representations of family dysfunction as derived from their drawings.

Poverty, household chaos, and interparental aggression predict children's ability to recognize and modulate negative emotions.

The following prospective longitudinal study considers the ways that protracted exposure to verbal and physical aggression between parents may take a substantial toll on emotional adjustment for 1,025 children followed from 6 to 58 months of age. Exposure to chronic poverty from infancy to early childhood as well as multiple measures of household chaos were also included as predictors of children's ability to recognize and modulate negative emotions in order to disentangle the role of interparental conflict from the socioeconomic forces that sometimes accompany it. Analyses revealed that exposure to greater levels of interparental conflict, more chaos in the household, and a higher number of years in poverty can be empirically distinguished as key contributors to 58-month-olds' ability to recognize and modulate negative emotion.

Child care and cortisol across early childhood: context matters.

A considerable body of literature suggests that children's child-care experiences may impact adrenocortical functioning in early childhood. Yet emerging findings also suggest that the magnitude and sometimes the direction of child-care effects on development may be markedly different for children from higher risk contexts. Using data from a large population-based sample of families from predominantly low-income backgrounds in rural communities, we tested the degree to which links between children's child-care experiences (at 7-36 months) and their subsequent cortisol levels (at 48 months) were moderated by their level of cumulative environmental risk.

Association between Maternal sensitivity and Externalizing Behavior from Preschool to Preadolescence.

Using data from the longitudinal NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (N=1364), this study examined the association between mothers' sensitivity and children's externalizing behavior from preschool to preadolescence. Externalizing behavior declined on average across this period with a slowing of this decline around middle childhood. Maternal sensitivity remained relatively stable on average, and there was significant variation across mothers.

Chaos, Poverty, and Parenting: Predictors of Early Language Development.

Studies have shown that distal family risk factors like poverty and maternal education are strongly related to children's early language development. Yet, few studies have examined these risk factors in combination with more proximal day-to-day experiences of children that might be critical to understanding variation in early language. Young children's exposure to a chronically chaotic household may be one critical experience that is related to poorer language, beyond the contribution of SES and other demographic variables.