International conference on Adolescent Medicine & Child Psychology September 28-30, 2015 Houston, USA

Ciobica Alin is a researcher at the Faculty of Biology,Alexandru Ioan Cuza Iasi, Romania. His main interests are directed towards the understanding for the relevance of the oxidative stress status in most of the neuropsychiatric disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, schizophrenia, depression, anxiety and of course autism, in both human patients and animal models

Autism is a complex disorder characterized by repetitive behavior and impaired social communication. Still, apart from these main manifestations, a significant number of cases display impaired emotional learning and memory functions. We tried to better understand the memory functions in an environmentally induced rat animal model of autism, based on the administration of valproic acid (VPA) during gestation (500 mg/kg or saline on day 12.5 of gestation) and examined the resultant progeny on specific memory tests, such as the Y maze task and the 8-arms radial maze.rnOur data indicated that animals perinatally exposed to VPA are showing, besides specific social interaction deficiencies, significant behavioral alterations in Y maze task, as expressed in decreased spontaneous alternations percentage, suggesting affected immediate working memory and in the radial arm maze, as expressed to an increased number of both reference and working memory errors. In conclusion, we showed significant memory deficits in a VPA-induced rat model of autism, demonstrating also the relevance of the memory processes in autism, apart from the social deficiencies.

Jo Dudeney is currently undertaking the final year of her PhD at The University of Sydney, Australia. Prior to this she completed her Doctorate of Clinical Psychology and a Masters of Organizational Psychology. Her domain is Pediatric Psychology and her dissertation is focused on the comorbidity of asthma and anxiety in children and adolescents. Through her research efforts, she has been both primary and co-author on a number of publications. Clinically, she works part-time at an inpatient facility for adolescents with anxiety and depressive disorders coupled with school refusal

Background: Asthma is the leading chronic disease in children and a diagnosis of asthma can have wide-ranging medical and psychological effects on both the child and their family. This study identified parents’ views on their child’s asthma diagnosis experience and the consequential psychosocial burdens of that diagnosis on the family.Methods: A grounded theory methodology was chosen as the topic was a relatively unexplored area of inquiry. Parents of children with asthma were recruited. Sampling was discontinued when no new relevant data was emerging. Nineteen caregivers (child age range: 2-14) took part in the study by completing semi-structured interviews and self- and parent-report questionnaires.Results: Parents reported having one of three diagnostic experiences; straight forward, ambiguous or traumatic. Parents further reported psychosocial impacts related to diagnosis and ongoing management such as lack of knowledge, parental and child stress and worry, overprotective parenting styles and child autonomy over the disease.Conclusions: The current findings highlight the need for appropriate, accurate communication from health professionals at the time of diagnosis, increased provisions of information to families about medical and psychological aspects of the diagnosis and intervention for those families of children with high asthma severity or who experienced a traumatic asthma diagnosis.

Yi Sun have more than 10 years academic experiences in Psychology from master course and two year working experience as research fellow after doctoral course. She finished my bachelor in China and obtained my master and doctoral degree in Japan. She like communicating with people from different culture and interested in the influence of different culture on the development of individuals’ personality. Recently, my researches are focusing on the influence of environment on children’s psychological development, especially the special social environment of China grandparents are taking a main role in child-raising before preschool.

Background: In recent years, grandparents are playing a very important role in child-caring in China because both parents have to work but without enough nursery school. However, less parent-child interaction and grandparents’ doting on children and their physical weakness has brought some problems in children’s psychological development. So far few researches have been done about grand parenting.Objectives: The study aimed to examine the influence of grand parenting on preschool children’s personality and adaptation.Method: With the cooperation of a kindergarten in Shanghai, 530 parents of 3-6 years children were invited to participate in the investigation with their consent. Finally 505 of them completed the questionnaire effectively.Results: Three factors were extracted by exploratory factor analysis for children’s temperament-stranger shyness (SS), easy frustration (EF) and prosociality (P) and two factors for adaptation-difficulty in attending kindergarten (DAK) and preoccupied attachment to parents (PAP). The mean difference analysis by grade of kindergarten showed that 1st grade children were significantly higher in EF and PAP than 3rd grade children and lower in P but higher in DAK than 2nd and 3rd grade ones. The correlation analysis suggests that there were significant relation between parenting style and children’s personality and adaptation. The only-grandparents parenting style related to higher EF and PAP but lower prosaicality especially in 1st grade children group.Conclusions: Although with children’s growth, their emotion-control ability, prosociality and adaptation in kindergarten will be improved, the only-grandparents parenting style still may have some negative influence on children’s personality and adaptation than only-parents parenting or co-parenting with grandparents.

Ioana Cristina completed her graduation and doctoral studies in the year 2014 from Nagoya University, Graduate School of Education and Human Development. In the year 2004 she completed her Master program in psycho-diagnosis and psychotherapy from Bucharest University, Graduate School of Psychology and Educational Sciences. Currently she is a research assistant in Nagoya University, Center of Innovation for Future Society

We aimed to examine the hypothesis according to which the presence in the household of less than 18 years old in association to the exposure to long hours of intermediated communication of their parents has significant effects on life-satisfaction. In a sample of n=231 participants, 139 females and 92 males with age ranges of 35 to 45 years old and 60 to 70 years old, 110 Asian and 112 non-Asian, the results of the pair-comparison t-test revealed that there are significant mean differences in regard to desire for more leisure time, feeling of relief during a month before and minutes on a day spent on intermediated communication. The group having children inside their household showed also a higher mean than the counterpart on the criteria of the average daily minutes spent on other than face to face communication. Since the children learn social behaviors from their parents, but are also more vulnerable than adults to addictions, we discuss possible implications of these findings on the implementation of a language learning program utilizing a manual, CD and an interactive web, face-to-face and link

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Background: Randomized controlled trials of drug use, and violent behavior are difficult to conduct and are unethical. We used propensity score methodology to test whether there is an association between using drugs, and violent behaviour. We built a model to predict the probability that a student will perpetrate violence.\r\n\r\nMethods: A cross sectional study involving 2000 adolescents in secondary schools was conducted. The outcome variable was violent behaviour, exposure variable was drug use while other covariates were alcohol use, gender, age, family type, father’s and mother education, person who student lives with, person who brought student up, missed classes without permission, and parental marital status. We used Propensity Scores to form a comparison or control group (students who do not use drug) that is similar to the exposure group (student who use drug) in all observed predictors of violence. We estimated the propensity score by logistic regression.\r\n\r\nResults: Our findings showed that drug use was more common among students whose parents had no formal education, those who were brought up by their grandparents, those who live with their fathers only, those whose parents were divorced and those who used alcohol and missed classes. Our results further showed a significant association between drug use and violent behavior.\r\n\r\nConclusion: This analysis strengthens the evidence of the association between drug use and violent behaviour. It also showed that PSM methodology, by compensating for selection bias, is a useful tool for estimating the relationship between drug use and violence in cross-sectional studies. \r\n

Josh Fergeus is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He was President of the Foster Care Association of Victoria from 2011-2014, and Senior Policy and Project Leader for Home-Based Care at the Centre for Excellence in Child and Family Welfare from 2009-2013. He has been an accredited foster carer since 2005

Across the developed world, efforts are being made to identify and develop effective interventions that will reduce the prevalence and severity of mental health problems among children and young people in out-of-home care. Foster and kinship carers have been identified as critically important in this process. In order to develop an understanding of what interventions and or supports assist carers in responding effectively to the mental health needs of the children and young people in their care, a scoping review was undertaken. Using the scoping study method, 1,064 publications were identified and 82 publications were selected for further analysis. The review shows that promising interventions that aim to improve the mental health of children and young people living in out-of-home care have been developed and trial led both in Australia and internationally. However, the review also highlights the lack of research specifically focused on the role of the carer.

Evgenia Gkintoni is a Psychologist and PhD student in Clinical Neuropsychology at the University of Crete. She holds Master of Science in Mental Health from the University of Athens in Greece and Master of Education from Roma Tre University in Italy. She works as a Clinical Psychologist in the University Psychiatric Clinic of Patras. In addition, she is specialized in Systemic Family Therapy and in Cognitive Behavior Therapy in Eginiteion Hospital (A’ Psychiatric University Clinic in Athens) and she has participated as a Lecturer in European and International Conferences from 2009.

In this paper, Machine Learning and Data Mining methods were applied so as to discover patterns and associations among characteristics of Emotional Intelligence (EI) in a group of Greek adolescents 13-17 years. Emotional intelligence can be defined as the ability to monitor one’s own and other people’s emotions to discriminate between different emotions and label them appropriately and to use emotional information to guide thinking and behavior. For recording, tracing and evaluation of the EI, was used the standardized scale Trait Emotional Intelligence (TEIQue) which examines the Trait model of EI as proposed by K.V. Petrides. Trait EI is a constellation of emotional self-perceptions located at the lower levels of personality. In lay terms, trait EI refers to an individual’s self-perceptions of their emotional abilities. The TEIQue provides an operationalization for the model of Petrides and colleagues that conceptualizes EI in terms of personality. The test encompasses 15 subscales organized under four factors: Well-Being, self-control, emotionality and sociability. The psychometric properties of the tool were investigated in a study on a French-speaking population, where it was reported that its scores were globally normally distributed and reliable. The methodology, that was adopted, consists of three concrete phases. During the first phase electronic questionnaires were created and posted through the website. Subsequently, data were collected and preprocessed from the questionnaires. The data set for analysis was consisted of demographics elements of responders such as the gender, the birth-place, the place of present residence, educational background of both the respondents and their parents, professional occupation of parents and also of subscales of the TEIQue test. During the third phase, the data set was analyzed based on Data Mining techniques and evaluate the results. More specifically, we utilized classification algorithms so as to manage to describe the hidden patterns underlying in the data. Decision trees are a powerful way in order to represent and facilitate statements analysis (psychological) principally, comprising successive decisions and variable results in a designated period. Furthermore, clustering technique (such as K-Means algorithm) was applied which is a well-known knowledge discovery process of extracting previously unknown knowledge, actionable information from very large scientific and commercial databases. The k-means is a very popular algorithm and one of the best for implementing the clustering process. Also, the parameters of the algorithm were set depending on the application cases and also the results were correlated with the demographic characteristic of the respondents in order to evaluate and assess the significance of exported rules/conclusions. In addition, the respondents were classified into clusters based on the four factors emerged by the psychometric tool. The results indicate among others that the use of Data Mining methods is an important tool to export and receive the conclusions and decisions especially in the field of psychological assessment and mental health in adolescents.rn

\r\nBiography\r\n\r\nSedigheh Amir Ali Akbari is a Faculty Member of Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences. She has published more than 10 papers in journals that cited in PubMed and more than 50 papers in Iranian journal that cited in Scopus, Google scholar, ISC.\r\n

Abstract\r\n\r\nBackground & Aim: Despite advances in medical sciences in diagnosis and treatment of diseases, delayed development of children is still considered one of the global health problems. This study investigates correlation between violence against women by their Intimate partners with developmental delay in children aged 6 months.\r\n\r\nMaterial & Methods: This cross-sectional study was performed on 325 mothers and their 6 month-old infants in medical centers affiliated to Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences Tehran, Iran (2014-2015). Mothers were selected through multi-stage random sampling. For gathering data the instruments used were: A demographic and obstetric specification questionnaire, infant specification questionnaire, domestic violence questionnaire and Ages and Stages Questionnaire to determine the status of children’s development. The data were analyzed using SPSS 19 software.\r\n\r\nResults: The development delay in infant was 11/1%. About 40/2% of the participants experienced at least one type of violence (sexual 13/8%, physical 11% and mental 35%). Totally there were a significant correlation between maternal domestic violence and delayed infant development (p=0/004), between mental violence and developmental delays (P=0/003) and between sexual violence and developmental delays (P=0/008) but significant between physical violence and developmental delays was not observed (P=0/55).\r\n\r\nConclusion: Given the correlation between maternal domestic violence and infant development, it is recommended to screen mothers for violence in order to perform early interventions in developmental disorders.