Adolescent Behavior

Research on the efficacy of yoga for improving mental, emotional, physical, and behavioral health characteristics in school settings is a recent but growing field of inquiry. This systematic review of research on school-based yoga interventions published in peer-reviewed journals offers a bibliometric analysis that identified 47 publications. The studies from these publications have been conducted primarily in the United States (n = 30) and India (n = 15) since 2005, with the majority of studies (n = 41) conducted from 2010 onward.

Adolescence is a unique developmental period characterized by major physiological, psychological, social, and brain changes, as well as an increased incidence of maladaptive, addictive behaviors. With the use of MRI techniques, researchers have been able to provide a better understanding of adolescent brain maturation and how neurodevelopment affects cognition and behavior. This review discusses adolescent brain development and its potential influence on psychotherapeutic change.

Obesity presents a public health challenge and is a serious chronic medical condition that is associated with multiple co-morbidities and reduced survivability/longevity. African American adolescents who retain weight after pregnancy are at the highest risk of becoming obese adults. Obesity is associated with 300,000 deaths per year and expected to cost the US. health care system over 237 million dollars within the next decade. The prevalence of obesity is cause for concern because of its economic costs and its toll in human suffering due to related morbidity and mortality.

OBJECTIVE: To determine the relative importance of familial, dietary, behavioral, psychological and social risk factors for predicting body mass index (BMI) change, and onset of overweight and obesity among adolescent girls. METHODS: Data from the NHLBI Growth and Health Study (n = 2 150), a longitudinal cohort of girls, were used to identify the most important predictors of change in BMI percentile between the ages of 9 and 19 years, and second, risk for becoming overweight and obese.

BACKGROUND: Genotype x environment interaction (G x E) arises when genes influence sensitivity to the environment. G x E is easily recognized in experimental organisms that permit randomization of genotypes over fixed environmental treatments. Genotype-environment correlation (rGE) arises when genetic effects create or evoke exposure to environmental differences.

BACKGROUND: The capacity to control or regulate one's emotions, cognitions and behavior is central to competent functioning, with limitations in these abilities associated with developmental problems. Parenting appears to influence such self-regulation. Here the differential-susceptibility hypothesis is tested that the more putative 'plasticity alleles' adolescents carry, the more positively and negatively influenced they will be by, respectively, supportive and unsupportive parenting.

Finely tuning levels of the key neurotransmitter serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine [5-HT]) during early life is essential for brain development and setting pathways for health and disorder across the early life span. Given the central role of 5-HT in brain development, regulation of mood, stress reactivity, and risk for psychiatric disorders, alterations in 5-HT signaling early in life have critical implications for behavior and mental health in childhood and adolescence.

Environmental stressors during childhood and adolescence influence postnatal brain maturation and human behavioral patterns in adulthood. Accordingly, excess stressors result in adult-onset neuropsychiatric disorders. We describe an underlying mechanism in which glucocorticoids link adolescent stressors to epigenetic controls in neurons.

Decades of mismanagement, combined with the withdrawal of international cooperation and a protracted war, have seriously affected the health system in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and the health status of the population. As part of a Belgian development cooperation programme, we conducted a study in Kinshasa and Bukavu in April-May 2004 on how a rights-based approach could contribute to an effective and appropriate response to the sexual and reproductive health needs of Congolese adolescents. Access to condom information and supplies was studied in this context.

Jesuit-run Marian Congregations proliferated in 1930s Spain. Drawing on literature produced for their members, this article demonstrates how gendered understandings were fundamental to the congregations' symbolic delineation of an uncontaminated Catholic space. Visions of an incorrupt male elite abound, reinforcing the Jesuits' educational mission among future leaders and opinion-formers. In contrast, the purity of women and children was seen as a sign of society's moral health. Modesty was the quintessential female virtue.