Genetic differential susceptibility in literacy-delayed children: a randomized controlled trial on emergent literacy in kindergarten.

In this randomized controlled trial, 508 5-year-old kindergarten children participated, of whom 257 were delayed in literacy skills because they belonged to the lowest quartile of a national standard literacy test. We tested the hypothesis that some children are more susceptible to school-entry educational interventions than their peers due to their genetic makeup, and thus whether the dopamine receptor D4 gene moderated intervention effects. Children were randomly assigned to a control condition or one of two interventions involving computer programs tailored to the literacy needs of delayed pupils: Living Letters for alphabetic knowledge and Living Books for text comprehension. Effects of Living Books met the criteria of differential susceptibility. For carriers of the dopamine receptor D4 gene seven-repeat allele (about one-third of the delayed group), the Living Books program was an important addition to the common core curriculum in kindergarten (effect size d = 0.56), whereas the program did not affect the other children (d = -0.09). The same seven-repeat carriers benefited more from Living Letters than did the noncarriers, as reflected in effect sizes of 0.63 and 0.34, respectively, although such differences did not fulfill the statistical criteria for differential susceptibility. The implications of differential susceptibility for education and regarding the crucial question "what works for whom?" are discussed.

Attentional bias to activity of different parts of the body in children with functional abdominal pain: an experimental study.

OBJECTIVES: To investigate whether children with functional abdominal pain (FAP) show an attentional bias for their bodily activity, and whether receiving information about bodily activity influenced perception of bodily sensations. METHODS: A total of 30 children with FAP and 30 healthy children performed a dot-probe task, in which they were shown sham pictures about their bodily activity. RESULTS: Contrary to our hypotheses, no attentional bias for gut activity was found in either group. However, children with FAP were slower than healthy children on all supraliminal gut-activity trials, suggesting that pictures of gut activity distracted children with FAP from the task they were performing. Both groups showed an attention bias away from supraliminal pictures about heart activity. As hypothesized, more children with FAP than healthy children reported increases in pain after the experiment. CONCLUSIONS: Children with FAP seemed more strongly influenced by information about gut activity than healthy children. The present study should be replicated for intervention purposes.

Do parents maintain or exacerbate pediatric functional abdominal pain? A systematic review and meta-analysis.

Parents may maintain or exacerbate functional abdominal pain (FAP) in children through modeling of physical symptoms and solicitous responses to the child's complaints. This systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to examine these relationships. Parents of children with FAP reported more physical symptoms than parents of healthy children (effect size d = .36). As all studies were cross-sectional or retrospective, the causal direction was unclear. For parental responses to child complaints, not enough studies were available to perform a meta-analysis. We conclude that the present literature is unfit to establish whether parents maintain or exacerbate pediatric FAP through the processes investigated.