Efavirenz (EFV) is a well-known, effective anti-retroviral drug long used in first-line treatment for children and adults with HIV and HIV/AIDS. Due to its narrow window of effective concentrations, between 1 and 4 µg/mL, and neurological side effects at supratherapeutic levels, several investigations into the pharmacokinetics of the drug and its…

The current study investigated language development of children residing in institutional care (IC) in Russia, compared to peers raised by biological family care (BFC). We used standardized behavioral testing (Preschool Language Scale-5, McArthur CDI), and an event-related potential picture-word matching paradigm. Children in IC significantly…

The current study investigated the long-term effects of institutionalization on the inhibitory control of young adults raised in orphanages using the color-word Stroop task. We examined whether young adults raised in institutions (IC group; n = 24; M = 22.17 years, SD = 6.7) would demonstrate poorer behavioral performance and atypical neural…

There is an increasing attention to the phenomenon referred to as "twice exceptional" ("2e") children, namely, children who demonstrate both exceptional abilities and disabilities. In this essay, this concept is applied to delinquency and/or emotional-behavior disorder and gifts (talents) in the performance arts, exploring the…

The etiological mechanisms of the genetic underpinnings of developmental language disorder (DLD) are unknown, in part due to the behavioral heterogeneity of the disorder's manifestations. In this study, we explored an association between the SETBP1 gene (18q21.1), revealed in a genome-wide association study of DLD in a geographically isolated…

In this article we present a summary of the literature on the associations between learning difficulties/disabilities and juvenile delinquency. This literature is almost a hundred years old, but, although reportedly demonstrating the low academic achievement-delinquency connection, contains numerous unanswered questions regarding the frequency,…

Unlike intelligence, creativity has rarely been investigated from the standpoint of cross-cultural invariance of the structure of the instruments used to measure it. In the study reported in this article, we investigated the cross-cultural invariance of expert ratings of creative stories written by undergraduate students from the Russian…

In this essay, we comment on the dominant practice in high-resource societies of placing children without biological parental care (CwoBPC) into substitution families, and the promotion of this solution as evidence-based and state of the art. As the Russian Federation has formulated and is now addressing in matching legislation, it possibly…

The etiological forces of development have been a central question for the developmental sciences (however defined) since their crystallization as a distinct branch of scientific inquiry. Although the history of these sciences contains examples of extreme positions capitalizing on either the predominance of the genome (i.e., the accumulation of…