The present study aimed to examine the effects of the Spanish confinement derived from the COVID-19 crisis on children and their families, accounting for child's age. A range of child negative (e.g., ...conduct problems) and positive outcomes (e.g., routine maintenance) were examined, along with a set of parent-related variables, including resilience, perceived distress, emotional problems, parenting distress and specific parenting practices (e.g., structured or avoidant parenting), which were modeled through path analysis to better understand child adjustment. Data were collected in April 2020, with information for the present study provided by 940 (89.6%) mothers, 102 (9.7%) fathers and 7 (0.7%) different caregivers, who informed on 1049 Spanish children (50.4% girls) aged 3 to 12 years (M
= 7.29; SD = 2.39). The results suggested that, according to parents' information, most children did not show important changes in behavior, although some increasing rates were observed for both negative and positive outcomes. Child adjustment was influenced by a chain of effects, derived from parents' perceived distress and emotional response to the COVID-19 crisis, via parenting distress and specific parenting practices. While parenting distress in particular triggered child negative outcomes, specific parenting practices were more closely related to child positive outcomes. These findings may help to better inform, for potential future outbreaks, effective guidelines and prevention programs aimed at promoting the child's well-being in the family.
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the lives of millions of people around the globe and some of the unprecedent emerged disruptions, are likely to have been particularly challenging for young children ...(e.g., school closures, social distancing measures, movement restrictions). Studying the impact of such extraordinary circumstances on their well-being is crucial to identify processes leading to risk and resilience. To better understand how Spanish children have adapted to the stressful disruptions resulting from the pandemic outbreak, we examined the effects of child coping and its interactions with contextual stressors (pandemic and family related) on child adjustment, incorporating in our analysis a developmental perspective. Data was collected in April 2020, through parent-reports, during the acute phase of the pandemic and, temporarily coinciding with the mandatory national quarantine period imposed by the Spanish Government. A sample of 1,123 Spanish children (50% girls) aged 3 to 12 (Mage = 7.26; SD = 2.39) participated in the study. Results showed differences in the use of specific strategies by children in different age groups (i.e., 3-6, 7-9 and 10-12-year-olds). Despite the uncontrollable nature of the pandemic-related stressors, child disengagement coping was distinctively associated to negative outcomes (i.e., higher levels of behavioral and emotional difficulties), whereas engagement coping predicted psychosocial adjustment across all age groups. Moreover, interactively with child coping, parent fear of the future and parent dispositional resilience appear as relevant contextual factors to predict both negative and positive outcomes, but their effects seem to be age dependent, suggesting a higher contextual vulnerability for younger children. These findings might have implications for identifying individual and contextual risk and informing potential preventive interventions aimed to reduce the impact of future pandemic outbreaks on children of different ages.
Abstract
RegulonDB, first published 20 years ago, is a comprehensive electronic resource about regulation of transcription initiation of Escherichia coli K-12 with decades of knowledge from classic ...molecular biology experiments, and recently also from high-throughput genomic methodologies. We curated the literature to keep RegulonDB up to date, and initiated curation of ChIP and gSELEX experiments. We estimate that current knowledge describes between 10% and 30% of the expected total number of transcription factor- gene regulatory interactions in E. coli. RegulonDB provides datasets for interactions for which there is no evidence that they affect expression, as well as expression datasets. We developed a proof of concept pipeline to merge binding and expression evidence to identify regulatory interactions. These datasets can be visualized in the RegulonDB JBrowse. We developed the Microbial Conditions Ontology with a controlled vocabulary for the minimal properties to reproduce an experiment, which contributes to integrate data from high throughput and classic literature. At a higher level of integration, we report Genetic Sensory-Response Units for 200 transcription factors, including their regulation at the metabolic level, and include summaries for 70 of them. Finally, we summarize our research with Natural language processing strategies to enhance our biocuration work.
This work presents the design, development and implementation of a smart sensor to monitor the respiratory rate. This sensor is aimed at overcoming the drawbacks of other systems currently available ...in market, namely, devices that are costly, uncomfortable, difficult-to-install, provide low detection sensitivity, and little-to-null patient-to-patient calibration. The device is based on capacitive sensing by means of an LC oscillator. Experimental results show that the sensor meets the necessary requirements, making feasible the proposed monitoring system with the technology used.
Multiple factors have been proposed to explain the disappearance of Neandertals between ca. 50 and 40 kyr BP. Central to these discussions has been the identification of new techno-cultural complexes ...that overlap with the period of Neandertal demise in Europe. One such complex is the Châtelperronian, which extends from the Paris Basin to the Northern Iberian Peninsula between 43,760-39,220 BP. In this study we present the first open-air Châtelperronian site in the Northern Iberian Peninsula, Aranbaltza II. The technological features of its stone tool assemblage show no links with previous Middle Paleolithic technology in the region, and chronological modeling reveals a gap between the latest Middle Paleolithic and the Châtelperronian in this area. We interpret this as evidence of local Neandertal extinction and replacement by other Neandertal groups coming from southern France, illustrating how local extinction episodes could have played a role in the process of disappearance of Neandertals.
► The Spanish version of the TIPI exhibited reasonably good test–retest reliability and self–other agreement. ► As expected, internal consistency was low. ► Overall, convergent–discriminant validity ...with the NEO-PI-R and correlations with external criteria were adequate. ► Agreeableness was the scale with the greatest shortcomings in psychometric terms. ► On the whole, the Spanish version of the TIPI appears to hold promise for use under conditions requiring maximum brevity.
Widespread interest in short scales for measuring personality traits has generated a need for systematic studies that validate them in different languages and cultures. This paper examines the psychometric properties of the Ten Item Personality Inventory (TIPI) applied to a sample of 1181 Spanish adults. The TIPI was administered jointly with the NEO-PI-R and measures of Well-Being and Risk-Taking. Subsamples of 198 and 142 participants were asked to provide data for test–retest reliability (6weeks after) and self–other agreement calculations, respectively. Overall, the TIPI exhibited reasonably acceptable psychometric properties for measuring the Big Five in terms of test–retest reliability, self–other agreement, factor structure, convergence with the NEO-PI-R and correlations with relevant criteria. As expected, low internal consistency was the greatest limitation of the TIPI scales. Agreeableness displayed shortcomings in all psychometric tests; future studies to refine the TIPI should more fully examine the difficulty of capturing this dimension. Otherwise, the TIPI seems to be a promising instrument for situations where brevity is a priority.
Metabolism is loosely defined as the set of physical and chemical interactions associated with the processes responsible for sustaining life. Two evident features arise whenever one looks at ...metabolism: first, metabolism is conformed as a very complex and intertwined construct of the many associated biomolecular processes. Second, metabolism is characterized by a high degree of stability reflected by the organisms resilience to either environmental changes or pathogenic conditions. Here we will investigate the relationship between these two features. By having access to the full set of human metabolic interactions as reported in the highly curated KEGG database, we built an integrated human metabolic network comprising metabolic, transcriptional regulation, and protein-protein interaction networks. We hypothesized that a metabolic process may exhibit resilience if it can recover from perturbations at the pathway level; in other words, metabolic resilience could be due to pathway crosstalk which may implicate that a metabolic process could proceed even when a perturbation has occurred. By analyzing the topological structure of the integrated network, as well as the hierarchical structure of its main modules or subnetworks, we observed that behind biological resilience lies an intricate communication structure at the topological and functional level with pathway crosstalk as the main component. The present findings, alongside the advent of large biomolecular databases, such as KEGG may allow the study of the consequences of this redundancy and resilience for the study of healthy and pathological phenotypes with many potential applications in biomedical science.
The spread of the newly emerged severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS-CoV-2) virus has led to more than 430 million confirmed cases, including more than 5.9 million deaths, reported worldwide as of ...24 February 2022. Conservation of viral genomes is important for pathogen identification and diagnosis, therapeutics development and epidemiological surveillance to detect the emergence of new viral variants. An intense surveillance of virus variants has led to the identification of Variants of Interest and Variants of Concern. Although these classifications dynamically change as the pandemic evolves, they have been useful to guide public health efforts on containment and mitigation. In this work, we present CovDif, a tool to detect conserved regions between groups of viral genomes. CovDif creates a conservation landscape for each group of genomes of interest and a differential landscape able to highlight differences in the conservation level between groups. CovDif is able to identify loss in conservation due to point mutations, deletions, inversions and chromosomal rearrangements. In this work, we applied CovDif to SARS-CoV-2 clades (G, GH, GR, GV, L, O, S and G) and variants. We identified all regions for any defining SNPs. We also applied CovDif to a group of population genomes and evaluated the conservation of primer regions for current SARS-CoV-2 detection and diagnostic protocols. We found that some of these protocols should be applied with caution as few of the primer-template regions are no longer conserved in some SARS-CoV-2 variants. We conclude that CovDif is a tool that could be widely applied to study the conservation of any group of viral genomes as long as whole genomes exist.
Pursuing the Dark Triad Maneiro, Lorena; López-Romero, Laura; Gómez-Fraguela, José Antonio ...
Journal of individual differences,
2019, Volume:
40, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The Dirty Dozen scale is a short measure developed to assess the Dark Triad traits, namely Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and narcissism, which has previously shown good psychometric properties. The ...aim of this study was to validate a Spanish version of the Dirty Dozen through the assessment of its psychometric properties in a sample constituted by 326 young adults aged 18-34 (M = 20.55; SD = 1.89) from Spain. The Spanish version of the Dirty Dozen showed good internal consistency and acceptable test-retest stability. Likewise, the analysis of the factorial structure supported the three-factor solution and showed a best fit for the bifactorial model. The latent factor of the general Dark Triad was associated with low levels of Honesty/Humility, psychopathic traits, impulsivity, and sensation seeking; whereas a differential pattern of associations between the three specific Dark Triad latent factors and the nomological network was found. Furthermore, the Dark Triad traits showed differential relations with reactive and proactive aggression, verifying the external validity of the Spanish version of the Dirty Dozen. Results support the distinctiveness of the Dark Triad traits and justify the Dirty Dozen as an efficient measure for dark personalities in Spanish-speaking contexts.
Child emotion regulation (ER) skills and specific parenting practices during the COVID-19 pandemic are likely to influence children adjustment in these unprecedented times. On this assumption, we ...first aimed to examine the predictive value of ER skills in relation to diverse indicators of behavioral and socioemotional adjustment. Then, we tested whether some of these associations could be partially explained through the mediator role of the specific parenting practices displayed within the pandemic context. These hypotheses were tested considering the previous levels of child reactivity as a potential moderator of the examined relations. Using parent-reported data from a sample of 874 Galician children (49.6% girls) aged 5 to 9 (Mage = 7.09; SD = 1.04), multiple regression and mediation analyses were conducted. Robust associations between ER skills and diverse indicators of child adjusment were found. Moreover, it was found that specific parenting practices mediate the relation between child ER skills and specific behavioral outcomes (i.e., child routine maintenance). Thus, our findings highlight the importance of ER skills for child adjustment during the COVID-19 crisis, not only through direct, but also indirect effects, suggesting that the kind of parenting style that children receive during the pandemic conditions might be partially elicited by their individual characteristics
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