ReviewNeuroImage2020
Early life stress and brain function: Activity and connectivity associated with processing emotion and reward.
Review in NeuroImage, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 115 papers, 3 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
115 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- The Impact of Adverse Childhood Experiences on Cognitive Control Across the Lifespan: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of Prospective Studies.Trauma, violence & abuse · 2025Pooled it
- The effects of childhood adversity: Two specific neural patterns.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2025Pooled it
- Neurostructural traces of early life adversities: A meta-analysis exploring age- and adversity-specific effects.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2022Pooled it
- Loss of pleasure (Anhedonia): A sex-dependent, cross-species consequence of unpredictable signals to the perinatal brain.Neurobiology of stress · 2026Article
- Early Life Stress Affects Human Decision Making by Increasing Expectations of Volatility.Developmental science · 2026Article
- Cognitive and affective neurodevelopment in youth exposed to deprivation and threat.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Early Life Stress and Adversity in Children: Neuroendocrine Mechanisms, Epigenetic Regulation, and Lifespan Developmental Outcomes-A Narrative Review.Children (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Early Relational Health and its Impact on the Developing Brain: A Scoping Review.Clinical child and family psychology review · 2026Article
- Association between adverse childhood experiences and cardiovascular disease risk in cardiovascular kidney metabolic syndrome stages 0 to 3.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- The Development of Trait Anxiety in Nonhuman Primates During the First Year of Life.Developmental science · 2026Article
- Persistent structural alteration of the extended limbic system in adolescents with childhood maltreatment.European psychiatry : the journal of the Association of European Psychiatrists · 2026Article
- Resilience and its external determinants: cross-sectional survey and network analysis of parenting, trauma and stress in college students.BJPsych open · 2026Article
- Differences in cortical gyrification and fractional amplitude of low-frequency fluctuations between early- and late-onset obsessive-compulsive disorder.Journal of psychiatry & neuroscience : JPN · 2026Article
- Dopaminergic frontostriatal pathways in major depressive disorder and childhood sexual abuse: a multimodal neuroimaging investigation.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Article
- Prefrontal cortex development and its implications in mental illness.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Review
- Early Life Adversity and Disordered Eating: Cognitive and Neural Mechanisms.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Similarity in Early Life Stress Exposure Is Associated With Similarity in Neural Representations in Early Adulthood.Human brain mapping · 2025Article
- Dysfunctional reward processing amplifies stress-related smartphone overuse: Evidence from ERPs and ecological momentary assessment.Journal of behavioral addictions · 2025Article
- The Association Between Childhood Trauma and Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor Treatment Outcomes in Adult Patients With Major Depressive Disorder.Psychiatry investigation · 2025Article
- Emotion Regulation and Neural Connectivity After Frustrative Non-Reward in Adolescents: The Moderating Role of Cognitive Flexibility.Developmental psychobiology · 2025Article
55 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Investigating the developmental sequelae of early life stress has provided researchers the opportunity to examine adaptive responses to extreme environments. A large body of work has established mechanisms by which the stressful experiences of childhood poverty, maltreatment, and institutional care can impact the brain and the distributed stress systems of the body. These mechanisms are reviewed briefly to lay the foundation upon which the current neuroimaging literature has been built. More recently, developmental cognitive neuroscientists have identified a number of the effects of early adversity, including differential behavior and brain function. Among the most consistent of these findings are differences in the processing of emotion and reward-related information. The neural correlates of emotion processing, particularly frontolimbic functional connectivity, have been well studied in early life stress samples with results indicating accelerated maturation following early adversity. Reward processing has received less attention, but here the evidence suggests a deficit in reward sensitivity. It is as yet unknown whether the accelerated maturation of emotion-regulation circuits comes at the cost of delayed development in other systems, most notably the reward system. This review addresses the early life stress neuroimaging literature that has investigated emotion and reward processing, identifying important next steps in the study of brain function following adversity.
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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.