Parental Use of "Cry Out" in a Community Sample During the First Year of Infant Life.

Objective: The primary objective was to identify the characteristics of parents and infants and parenting practices associated with delayed responsiveness to infant crying during the first year of infant life. A secondary objective was to evaluate, in a subsample of maternal-infant pairs, the associations between delayed responsiveness to infant crying and observational measures of maternal-infant interaction and infant-maternal attachment.

Method: This is a secondary analysis of the data from a community sample of pregnant women recruited to the Alberta Pregnancy Outcomes and Nutrition study.

Partner social support during pregnancy and the postpartum period and inflammation in 3-month-old infants.

Prenatal social stress "programs" offspring immune activity in animal models, but how the prenatal social environment affects human offspring inflammation is not known. Here, we test associations between prenatal partner support quality, i.e.

Social buffering of the maternal and infant HPA axes: Mediation and moderation in the intergenerational transmission of adverse childhood experiences.

Supportive social relationships can reduce both psychological and physiological responses to stressful experiences. Recently, studies have also assessed the potential for social relationships to buffer the intergenerational transmission of stress. The majority of these studies, however, have focussed on social learning as a mechanism responsible for the intergenerational transmission of stress.

Developmental origins of infant emotion regulation: Mediation by temperamental negativity and moderation by maternal sensitivity.

Emotion regulation is essential to cognitive, social, and emotional development and difficulties with emotion regulation portend future socioemotional, academic, and behavioral difficulties. There is growing awareness that many developmental outcomes previously thought to begin their development in the postnatal period have their origins in the prenatal period. Thus, there is a need to integrate evidence of prenatal influences within established postnatal factors, such as infant temperament and maternal sensitivity.

Biological embedding of perinatal social relationships in infant stress reactivity.

Whereas significant advances have been made in understanding how exposure to early adversity "gets under the skin" of children to result in long term changes in developmental outcomes, the processes by which positive social relationships become biologically embedded remain poorly understood. The aim of this study was to understand the pathways by which maternal and infant social environments become biologically embedded in infant cortisol reactivity. Two hundred seventy-two pregnant women and their infants were prospectively assessed during pregnancy and at 6 months postpartum.

Developmental origins of infant stress reactivity profiles: A multi-system approach.

Background: This study tested the hypothesis that maternal physiological and psychological variables during pregnancy discriminate between theoretically informed infant stress reactivity profiles.

Methods: The sample comprised 254 women and their infants. Maternal mood, salivary cortisol, respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), and salivary α-amylase (sAA) were assessed at 15 and 32 weeks gestational age.

CRYAB modulates the activation of CD4+ T cells from relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis patients.

Background: Suppression of activation of pathogenic CD4(+) T cells is a potential therapeutic intervention in multiple sclerosis (MS). We previously showed that a small heat shock protein, CRYAB, reduced T cell proliferation, pro-inflammatory cytokine production and clinical signs of experimental allergic encephalomyelitis, a model of MS.

Objective: We assessed whether the ability of CRYAB to reduce the activation of T cells translated to the human disease.