Trial reportNature2011
City living and urban upbringing affect neural social stress processing in humans.
Trial report in Nature, 2011. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 453 papers, 6 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
453 citing papers in PubMed, 6 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 1,561 citations in OpenAlex.
- The global burden of migraine and tension-type headache, 1990-2021: a multi-model Bayesian meta-regression with decomposition of age-period-cohort effects, health inequalities, and frontier analysis.Frontiers in neurology · 2026Pooled it
- Neuroscientific Insights into the Built Environment: A Systematic Review of Empirical Research on Indoor Environmental Quality, Physiological Dynamics, and Psychological Well-Being in Real-Life Contexts.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2025Pooled it
- Effects of urban green exercise on mental health: a systematic review and meta-analysis.Frontiers in public health · 2025Pooled it
- Cities and neuroscience research: A systematic literature review.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2022Pooled it
- Effect of Forest Therapy on Depression and Anxiety: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2021Pooled it
- Associations between brain activity and endogenous and exogenous cortisol - A systematic review.Psychoneuroendocrinology · 2020Pooled it
- Transcutaneous vagal nerve stimulation modulates stress-induced plasma ghrelin levels: A double-blind, randomized, sham-controlled trial.Journal of affective disorders · 2023Trial
- Physiological Effects of a Garden Plant Smellscape from the Perspective of Perceptual Interaction.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2023Trial
- Altered relationship between cortisol response to social stress and mediotemporal function during fear processing in people at clinical high risk for psychosis: a preliminary report.European archives of psychiatry and clinical neuroscience · 2022Trial
- Forest Therapy Alone or with a Guide: Is There a Difference between Self-Guided Forest Therapy and Guided Forest Therapy Programs?International journal of environmental research and public health · 2021Trial
- Thriving in the City: An Urban Living Lab to Facilitate Recovery From Psychosis.Early intervention in psychiatry · 2026Article
- Measuring the Impacts of Urbanicity and Different Exposome Factors on Human Brain through Exposure Network Mapping.Neuroscience bulletin · 2026Article
- Investigating effects of day-to-day variations in environmental exposure on the human brain: study protocol for the Day2Day Environment project.BMC neuroscience · 2026Article
- Schizophrenia: from mechanism to therapy.Science China. Life sciences · 2026Review
- Neighborhood Characteristics and Psychosis Risk Across Development.Schizophrenia research · 2026Article
- Brain network-based stratification of mental health disorders: design and cohort description of the STRATIFY and ESTRA studies.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Review
- Community severance and mental health-related hospital visits in New York City.Environmental epidemiology (Philadelphia, Pa.) · 2026Article
- Perceived antisemitism and the mental health of Jewish university students in Germany: a quantitative comparative study.BMC public health · 2026Article
- Sex differences in neural stress responses over psychosocial stress exposure.Brain structure & function · 2026Article
- Whole-Brain Fractional Anisotropy, Centered on the Superior Longitudinal Fasciculus, Is Positively Correlated With Urban Aesthetic Perception.Brain and behavior · 2026Article
393 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
11 authors at 4 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
More than half of the world's population now lives in cities, making the creation of a healthy urban environment a major policy priority. Cities have both health risks and benefits, but mental health is negatively affected: mood and anxiety disorders are more prevalent in city dwellers and the incidence of schizophrenia is strongly increased in people born and raised in cities. Although these findings have been widely attributed to the urban social environment, the neural processes that could mediate such associations are unknown. Here we show, using functional magnetic resonance imaging in three independent experiments, that urban upbringing and city living have dissociable impacts on social evaluative stress processing in humans. Current city living was associated with increased amygdala activity, whereas urban upbringing affected the perigenual anterior cingulate cortex, a key region for regulation of amygdala activity, negative affect and stress. These findings were regionally and behaviourally specific, as no other brain structures were affected and no urbanicity effect was seen during control experiments invoking cognitive processing without stress. Our results identify distinct neural mechanisms for an established environmental risk factor, link the urban environment for the first time to social stress processing, suggest that brain regions differ in vulnerability to this risk factor across the lifespan, and indicate that experimental interrogation of epidemiological associations is a promising strategy in social neuroscience.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.