Picky eating is one of the most frequent feeding problems in childhood and is often dismissed as a normal developmental phase. Despite a steadily expanding body of research, uncertainty persists regarding its clinical relevance, assessment, and management. This review synthesizes recent evidence on picky eating in children, with a specific focus on definitions, epidemiology, developmental trajectories, underlying mechanisms, clinical impact, and interventions. Reliance on broad definitions and prevalence estimates has obscured clinically meaningful distinctions between transient, developmentally typical food selectivity and persistent patterns associated with nutritional risk, functional impairment, and family stress. Drawing on contemporary data, we propose a continuum-based, phenotype-oriented framework that emphasizes persistence, severity, and functional impact rather than food refusal alone. Advances in understanding picky eating have not consistently translated into improved clinical care, highlighting persistent gaps in implementation, access, and dissemination of evidence-based feeding guidance. Finally, we outline priorities for future research and practice aimed at improving outcomes for children with clinically relevant picky eating.
Belgium’s democracy, historically marked by linguistic conflicts, government crises, political gridlocks, elitism, and citizen deference, has recently been celebrated for its democratic innovations. However, this recognition only scratches the surface of Belgium’s complex democratic renewal. This chapter offers a detailed discussion, highlighting the continuous deepening and broadening of democratic innovations. We focus on the institutionalization of citizen participation within the parliamentary framework and the increasing reliance on citizens in policy implementation. We also explore Belgium’s unique political landscape, examining the historical context, the rise of mini-publics, and the role of participatory budgeting. Additionally, we provide insights into the co-production of public services by citizens. Finally, we address ongoing challenges, such as ensuring inclusivity, maximizing political impact, and responsibly and effectively integrating the private sector and new technologies in democratic innovation.
Introduction Migration is a complex global phenomenon, with millions of people relocating each year driven by various social or personal reasons. Among them, refugees and asylum seekers form a particularly vulnerable subgroup, often forced to escape conflicts, persecution or life-threatening conditions. Most mental health assessment tools, originally developed in high-income countries and validated primarily in Western populations, may lack the cultural validity needed for this demographic. The primary objective is to systematically review and synthesise the psychometric properties and cultural validity of mental health assessment tools validated for refugees and asylum seekers. Secondary objectives are to (a) identify the range of mental health symptoms these tools assess and (b) describe the geographical coverage in terms of the regions of origin and host countries where tools have been validated.Methods and analysis Reported in accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) 2020 guidelines, the review will conduct searches across different databases (ie, MEDLINE, Embase, Web of Science Core Collection, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, PsycINFO, Global Index Medicus, CINAHL and Scopus), from inception to January 2025, with no restrictions on language. We will include validation, adaptation or diagnostic accuracy studies, as well as any other study design that reports at least one psychometric property of a mental health assessment tool. Two pairs of reviewers will screen, extract and appraise each study independently. Methodological quality will be assessed with the COSMIN (COnsensus-based Standards for the selection of health Measurement INstruments) Risk-of-Bias checklist for measurement studies and QUADAS-2 (Quality Assessment of Diagnostic Accuracy Studies-2) for diagnostic accuracy studies; the certainty of the evidence per property will be graded using the COSMIN-GRADE (Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development, and Evaluation) approach. Narrative synthesis will be performed for all properties; where appropriate, meta-analyses will pool Cronbach’s α (Fisher-Z), intraclass correlations and sensitivity/specificity estimates using random-effects models. Inconsistency will be explored with subgroup analyses and meta-regressions; publication bias will be investigated with funnel plots and Egger’s test when ≥10 studies are available.Ethics and dissemination Ethical approval is not required for this systematic review, as no empirical data will be collected. Results will be disseminated through a peer-reviewed publication in a scientific journal and presented at relevant conferences.PROSPERO registration number CRD42024510901.
Plant-soil feedbacks (PSFs) are a key mechanism regulating species dynamics in plant communities, typically negative due to the buildup of species-specific pathogens. Species-rich communities experience less negative PSFs than species-poor ones due to pathogen dilution, making PSFs a proposed mechanism behind the positive biodiversity-productivity relationship. PSFs may also benefit invasive species through the loss of their pathogens enhancing competitiveness according to the enemy release hypothesis (ERH). We hypothesized that invasive species would benefit from enemy release in species-poor communities, but less in species-rich ones where the advantage of enemy release disappears due to pathogen dilution. Accordingly, we expected that in sterilized soils, community diversity would not affect invasion success. We conducted a greenhouse experiment measuring the invasion success of three invasive forbs (Solidago gigantea, Avena sterilis, and Lupinus polyphyllus) in plant communities of varying richness (1, 2, 4, 8, and 12 species) in both unsterilized and sterilized soils. In unsterilized soils species diversity had a significant positive impact on native community biomass, while S. gigantea showed a clear negative effect from this increased competition at higher species diversities, as predicted. In sterilized soils these effects were strongly reduced. Growth of the two other invasive species was not affected by species diversity of the native community, showing that this mechanism may be species-specific. These findings support the ERH but only when exotic plants invade species-poor communities. Furthermore, our results suggest that the greater resistance of diverse plant communities to invasion may be at least partly be ascribed to increased competitive strength of the native community due to pathogen dilution.
In humans, the acquisition of a new motor skill is associated with the development of a wide range of cognitive areas and can create contexts in which new cognitive capacities develop. Motor development is linked to language development in infants, as crawling and walking promote active exploration of the environment, while manipulating objects and pointing draw the caregivers attention and help establish joint attention. Together, these motor experiences broaden communication contexts and support the learning of nouns (object-based words) and verbs (action-based words). However, many questions remain unanswered about how children's actions influence language development, qualitatively and quantitatively, and how they help the acquisition of different types of words, particularly the learning of verbs. In this paper, we propose a robot architecture to study how gestures can affect early language learning. The architecture follows the developmental robotics paradigm, i.e. inspired by the way human children develop and acquire language according to multiple developmental theories. The experimental results demonstrate that enabling the robot to produce gestures expands its vocabulary size and facilitates the acquisition of verbs. These results are in line with the finding that verb learning lags behind noun learning since the acquisition of verbs depends more on motor abilities and requires the maturation of motor development.
