ArticleJournal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines2017
Early adversity and learning: implications for typical and atypical behavioral development.
Article in Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 73 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
73 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 138 citations in OpenAlex.
- Annual Research Review: What processes are dysregulated among emotionally dysregulated youth? - a systematic review.Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines · 2025Pooled it
- How childhood adversity affects components of decision making.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2025Pooled it
- Pooled it
- A Family Focused Intervention Influences Hippocampal-Prefrontal Connectivity Through Gains in Self-Regulation.Child development · 2019Trial
- Early deprivation disruption of associative learning is a developmental pathway to depression and social problems.Nature communications · 2018Trial
- A protocol for the Teen Bugs study: An integrative, multi-omics approach to understanding the role of the gut microbiome and mesocorticolimbic system in adolescent mental health following early adverse caregiving.Brain, behavior, & immunity - health · 2026Article
- Early parenting is associated with the development of neural reward responsiveness from childhood through adolescence.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Association of adverse childhood experiences and gastrointestinal and liver diseases among middle-aged and elderly adults in China.Epidemiology and psychiatric sciences · 2026Article
- Early Life Stress Affects Human Decision Making by Increasing Expectations of Volatility.Developmental science · 2026Article
- Positive affect as a developmental mediator of early adversity and internalizing psychopathology.Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines · 2026Article
- Correction of Reward Processing Deficits in Youth with Disruptive Behavior and Trauma Exposure: A Pilot Study of Neural Responses to Fluoxetine.Clinical psychopharmacology and neuroscience : the official scientific journal of the Korean College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Article
- A preliminary study of implicit statistical learning in non-clinical young adults exposed to early adversity.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2026Article
- Adolescent stress exposure induces persistent, sex-specific cognitive deficits.Neurobiology of learning and memory · 2025Article
- Effects of Early Adversity and War Trauma on Learning Under Uncertainty.Developmental science · 2025Article
- Nucleus accumbens volume mediates the association between prenatal adversity and attention problems in youth.Development and psychopathology · 2025Article
- Article
- The influence of exposure to early-life adversity on agency-modulated reinforcement learning.Learning & memory (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.) · 2025Article
- Early life racial/ethnic discrimination effects on behavioral control and health outcomes in young adults.Learning & memory (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.) · 2025Article
- Left OFC Activation in Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy during an Inhibitory Control Task in an Early Years Sample: Integrating Stress Responses with Cognitive Function and Brain Activation.Developmental neuroscience · 2025Article
- The mind, brain, and body study: A protocol for examining the effects of the gut-brain-immune axis on internalizing symptoms in youth exposed to caregiving-related early adversity.Brain, behavior, & immunity - health · 2024Article
13 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundChildren who experience early adversity often develop emotion regulatory problems, but little is known about the mechanisms that mediate this relation. We tested whether general associative learning processes contribute to associations between adversity, in the form of child maltreatment, and negative behavioral outcomes.
methodsEighty-one participants between 12 and 17 years of age were recruited for this study and completed a probabilistic learning Task. Forty-one of these participants had been exposed to physical abuse, a form of early adversity. Forty additional participants without any known history of maltreatment served as a comparison group. All participants (and their parents) also completed portions of the Youth Life Stress Interview to understand adolescent's behavior. We calculated measures of associative learning, and also constructed mathematical models of learning.
resultsWe found that adolescents exposed to high levels of adversity early in their lives had lower levels of associative learning than comparison adolescents. In addition, we found that impaired associative learning partially explained the higher levels of behavioral problems among youth who suffered early adversity. Using mathematical models, we also found that two components of learning were specifically affected in children exposed to adversity: choice variability and biases in their beliefs about the likelihood of rewards in the environment.
conclusionsParticipants who had been exposed to early adversity were less able than their peers to correctly learn which stimuli were likely to result in reward, even after repeated feedback. These individuals also used information about known rewards in their environments less often. In addition, individuals exposed to adversity made decisions early in the learning process as if rewards were less consistent and occurred more at random. These data suggest one mechanism through which early life experience shapes behavioral development.
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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.