Health anxiety is a ubiquitous experience that arises when bodily sensations or changes are believed to be indicative of a serious disease. Severe expressions of health anxiety are most often classified as hypochondriasis in the current DSM-IV-TR; however, various alternative classification schemas have been proposed for the DSM-V. Regardless of classification, severe health anxiety has significant negative impacts on well-being, social and occupational functioning, and health care resource utilization. In this review, we focus on classification issues pertinent to severe health anxiety, summarize recent research regarding potential mechanisms underlying the condition, and summarize the state of the art with respect to assessment and treatment. Future research directions are noted and suggested throughout.

Background: Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a common childhood disorder that affects approximately 11% of children in the United States. Research supports that a single session of exercise benefits cognitive performance by children, and a limited number of studies have demonstrated that these effects can also be realized by children with ADHD. The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of acute exercise on cognitive performance by children with and without ADHD. Method: Children with and without ADHD were asked to perform cognitive tasks on 2 days following treatment conditions that were assigned in a random, counterbalanced order. The treatment conditions consisted of a 30-min control condition on 1 day and a moderate intensity exercise condition on the other day. Results: Exercise significantly benefited performance on all three conditions of the Stroop Task, but did not significantly affect performance on the Tower of London or the Trail Making Test. Conclusion: children with and without ADHD realize benefits in speed of processing and inhibitory control in response to a session of acute exercise, but do not experience benefits in planning or set shifting.

Theoretical perspectives of cognitive development have maintained that functional integration of the prefrontal cortex across infancy underlies the emergence of attentional control and higher cognitive abilities in early childhood. To investigate these proposed relations, we tested whether functional integration of prefrontal regions across the second half of the first year predicted observed cognitive performance in early childhood indirectly through observed attentional control one year prior (N=300). Results indicated that greater change in left—but not right—frontal EEG coherence between 5- and 10-months was positively associated with attentional control, cognitive flexibility, receptive language, and behavioral inhibitory control. Specifically, a larger increase in coherence between left frontal regions was positively associated with accuracy on a visual search task at age 2; and visual search accuracy was positively associated with receptive vocabulary, performance on a set-shifting task (DCCS), and delay of gratification at age 3. Finally, the indirect effects from the change in left frontal EEG coherence to 3-year cognitive flexibility, receptive language, and behavioral inhibitory control were significant, suggesting that internally controlled attention is a mechanism through which early neural maturation influences children’s cognitive development.

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Parasympathetic nervous system functioning in infancy may serve a foundational role in the development of cognitive and socioemotional skills (Calkins, 2007). In this study (N = 297), we investigated the potential indirect effects of cardiac vagal regulation in infancy on children's executive functioning and social competence in preschool via expressive and receptive language in toddlerhood. Vagal regulation was assessed at 10 months during two attention conditions (social, nonsocial) via task-related changes in respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA). A path analysis revealed that decreased RSA from baseline in the nonsocial condition and increased RSA in the social condition were related to larger vocabularies in toddlerhood. Additionally, children's vocabulary sizes were positively related to their executive function and social competence in preschool. Indirect effects from vagal regulation in both contexts to both 4-year outcomes were significant, suggesting that early advances in language may represent a mechanism through which biological functioning in infancy impacts social and cognitive functioning in childhood.