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Early childhood education programs, and particularly those designed to reduce gaps in school readiness between children in poverty and their more affluent peers, have increasingly addressed children's self-regulatory abilities -- their ability to manage behaviors, emotions, and cognitive processes. Although self-regulation is typically defined in volitional terms, the activity of multiple, involuntary, neurophysiological systems scaffolds the development of effortful self-regulation. In this article, we argue that the activity of one of these neurophysiological systems, the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), is directly relevant to the design and evaluation of early childhood education programs, given that the PNS makes moment-to-moment adjustments in children's metabolic output to support their interaction with the classroom environment. We go on to explain how examining PNS activity while children are in the early education classroom may offer insight into how early education programs achieve their effects and for whom these effects are most-fully realized. We conclude by offering a summary of modern methods of parasympathetic data collection and cleaning drawn from a recent study of young children in an early education environment and discussing the implications of these methods for future research.

Kidney cancer is a common malignancy that constitutes around 5% of all cancer cases. Males are twice as likely to acquire renal cell carcinoma (RCC) compared to females and experience a higher rate of mortality. These disparities indicate that sex hormone (SH)-dependent pathways may have an impact on the aetiology and pathophysiology of RCC. Examination of SH involvement in conventional signalling pathways, as well as genetics and genomics, especially the involvement of ribonucleic acid, reveal further insights into sex-related differences. An understanding of SHs and their influence on kidney cancer is essential to offer patients individualized medicine that would better meet their needs in terms of prevention, diagnosis and treatment. This review presents the understanding of sex-related differences in the clinical manifestation of kidney cancer patients and the underlying biological processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extant literature suggests that oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) and callous-unemotional (CU) behaviors in childhood and adolescence are associated with distinct patterns of psychophysiological functioning, and that individual differences in these patterns have implications for developmental pathways to disorder. Very little is known about the associations between psychophysiological functioning in infancy and later ODD and CU behaviors. This study examined associations between basal autonomic nervous system (ANS) functioning in infancy and ODD and CU behaviors in later childhood. Using longitudinal heart period (HP) and respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) data from the Durham Child Health and Development Study (N = 206), the current study tested associations within a structural equation modeling framework, between continuous measures of HP and RSA across the first 2 years of life, and later ODD and CU behaviors at first grade. Results indicate that ODD and CU behaviors in childhood are associated with lower baseline RSA, but not HP, across infancy. The implications of these findings for developmental models of ODD and CU behaviors are discussed.