Evidence is accumulating that individual and environmental factors in childhood and adolescence should be considered when investigating adult health and aging-related processes. The data required for this is gathered by comprehensive long-term longitudinal studies. This article describes the protocol of the Zurich Longitudinal Studies (ZLS), a set of three comprehensive cohort studies on child growth, health, and development that are currently expanding into adulthood. Between 1954 and 1961, 445 healthy infants were enrolled in the first ZLS cohort. Their physical, motor, (...) cognitive, and social development and their environment were assessed comprehensively across childhood, adolescence, and into young adulthood. In the 1970s, two further cohorts were added to the ZLS and assessed with largely matched study protocols: Between 1974 and 1979, the second ZLS cohort included 265 infants (103 term-born and 162 preterm infants), and between 1970 and 2002, the third ZLS cohort included 327 children of participants of the first ZLS cohort. Since 2019, the participants of the three ZLS cohorts have been traced and invited to participate in a first wave of assessments in adulthood to investigate their current health and development. This article describes the ZLS study protocol and discusses opportunities, methodological and conceptual challenges, and limitations arising from a long-term longitudinal cohort recruited from a study about development in early life. In the future, the ZLS will provide data to investigate childhood antecedents of adult health outcomes and, ultimately, will help respond to the frequent call of scientists to shift the focus of aging research into the first decades of life and, thus, to take a lifespan perspective on aging. (shrink)

The aim was to verify the potential of holistic approaches towards the evaluation of human figure drawing. Groht-Marnat, Tharinger, Stark favour this approach, and findings seem to legitimize considerations about its diagnostic productivity. Yama, Dans-Lopez and Tarroja have identified bizarre and artistic quality criteria for drawing that have a relevant interpretative meaning. Within the study involving 525 normal adult subjects, the hypothesis of differences in personality traits and performance level produced by authors of selected types of drawings, was verified. The (...) criterium of bizarre drawing proved to be an important indicator of intellectual abilities monitored by subtests of the ISA-S test, the non-verbal CF 2A test, Decision-making test. They achieved the lowest scores in all parameters, with significance in relation to more detailed drawings. Results from IHAVEZ and DOPEN questionnaires suggest that bizarre character producers are more emotionally instable, less emotionally resilient, less anticipating, and less self-controlling, less rational, responding more intensely to problems and are less orientated towards their solution. They are more neurotic and present more psychotic experience. The main limitation is the chosen approach. Holistically evaluated drawing is rare in terms of its occurrence in a normal population. Even within the files involving several hundred participiants, it is possible to clearly classify drawing in the maximum number of tens. Diversity of the terminology and methodological ambiguity constitutes another limitation. The bizarreness itself is not interpreted clearly, rather the contrary. (shrink)