Impact of mothers' IPV-PTSD on their capacity to predict their child's emotional comprehension and its relationship to their child's psychopathology

Background: Previous studies demonstrated that when the violence-exposed child becomes a mother and interacts with her own child during early sensitive periods for social-emotional development, she may have difficulties providing sensitive responsiveness to the child's emotional communication. Such difficulties place the child's development of emotional comprehension (EC) and related self-regulation at risk. The aim of this study was to examine how mothers' interpersonal violence-related posttraumatic disorder (IPV-PTSD) would affect their children's EC and their own ability to predict their children's EC. We also investigated how mothers' predictive ability would correlate with child psychopathology. Methods: Sixty-one mother-child dyads (36 with IPV-PTSD) participated in this study. Children's (mean age = 7.0 years, SD = 1.1) EC was assessed with the Test of Emotion Comprehension (child TEC) and their psychopathology as reported by the mother was assessed with the Child Behaviour Checklist (CBCL) and as evaluated by a clinician using selected modules of the Kiddie Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia (K-SADS). Mothers were measured for IPV-PTSD with the Clinician Administered PTSD Scale (CAPS) and for their capacity to predict their child's emotional comprehension (mother-responding-as-child TEC; mTEC). Results: We found no significant between-group differences in children's level of EC. Maternal PTSD was associated with lower scores on the mTEC, however. Reduced maternal scores on the mTEC were significantly associated with maternal report of increased aggressive child behaviour and with depression symptoms on the K-SADS. Further, scores on the mTEC interacted with maternal report of child aggression on child oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) symptoms on the K-SADS. Conclusion: These findings support that improving maternal emotional comprehension may help reduce child risk for psychiatric morbidity in this population

ICAR: endoscopic skull‐base surgery

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Designing swarms of cyber-physical systems: The H2020 CPSwarm Project

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) find applications in a number of large-scale, safety-critical domains e.g. transportation, smart cities, etc. As a matter of fact, the increasing interactions amongst different CPS are starting to generate unpredictable behaviors and emerging properties, often leading to unforeseen and/or undesired results. Rather than being an unwanted byproduct, these interactions could, however, become an advantage if they were explicitly managed, and accounted, since the early design stages. The CPSwarm project, presented in this paper, aims at tackling these kinds of challenges by easing development and integration of complex herds of heterogeneous CPS. Thanks to CPSwarm, systems designed through a combination of existing and emerging tools, will collaborate on the basis of local policies and exhibit a collective behavior capable of solving complex, real-world, problems. Three real-world use cases will demonstrate the validity of foundational assumption s of the presented approach as well as the viability of the developed tools and methodologies

Direct Cranial Nerve Involvement by Gliomas: Case Series and Review of the Literature

Malignant gliomas are characterized by infiltrative growth of tumor cells, including along white matter tracts. This may result in clinical cranial neuropathy due to direct involvement of a cranial nerve rather than by leptomeningeal spread along cranial nerves. Gliomas directly involving cranial nerves III-XII are rare with only eleven cases reported in the literature prior to 2014, including eight with imaging. We present eight additional cases demonstrating direct infiltration of a cranial nerve by glioma. Asymmetric cisternal nerve expansion as compared to the contralateral nerve was noted with a mean length of involvement of 9.4 mm. Based on our case series, the key imaging feature to recognize direct cranial nerve involvement by a glioma is the detection of an intra-axial mass in the pons or midbrain that is directly associated with expansion, signal abnormality, and/or enhancement of the adjacent cranial nerve(s)