R. Plak

• Leiden University

A majority of children with autism is diagnosed with one or more co-occurring mental health conditions. We aimed to explore how co-occurring conditions and Quality of Life differ between school types (general education vs. special education schools), and whether co-occurring conditions were subject to the same trends over time for the two school ty...

Inclusive education policies stimulate children with special educational needs, including autism, to attend regular education. We aimed to explore change over time in school placement and transitions of autistic children since the introduction of an inclusive education policy in the Netherlands (2014) and to examine the role of individual child cha...

Psychosocial characteristics of children with autism were collected before the COVID-19 pandemic and compared with data collected during the pandemic. The results show a surprising improvement, especially from T0 to T1. Girls and children attending special education showed increased difficulties over time, while older children showed fewer difficul...

Studies on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on autistic children’s psychosocial outcomes have shown mixed results. In the current study we aimed to gain a better insight into the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic by comparing psychosocial outcomes collected pre-pandemic with data collected during the pandemic. We used the Strengths and Difficultie...

Introduction: Children who experienced mild perinatal adversity (i.e., born late preterm or small for gestational age) are at increased risk for delays in early numeracy and literacy, which increases inequality in educational opportunities. However, this group showed increased susceptibility to the characteristics of their educational environment f...

In this randomized controlled trial, 508 5-year-old kindergarten children participated, of whom 257 were delayed in literacy skills because they belonged to the lowest quartile of a national standard literacy test. We tested the hypothesis that some children are more susceptible to school-entry educational interventions than their peers due to thei...

To investigate whether children with functional abdominal pain (FAP) show an attentional bias for their bodily activity, and whether receiving information about bodily activity influenced perception of bodily sensations. A total of 30 children with FAP and 30 healthy children performed a dot-probe task, in which they were shown sham pictures about...

Parents may maintain or exacerbate functional abdominal pain (FAP) in children through modeling of physical symptoms and solicitous responses to the child's complaints. This systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to examine these relationships. Parents of children with FAP reported more physical symptoms than parents of healthy children (effect...