Trial reportJournal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines2021
Heightened sensitivity to the caregiving environment during adolescence: implications for recovery following early-life adversity.
Trial report in Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 27 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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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
27 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 51 citations in OpenAlex.
- Attachment Concepts and Suicidal Thoughts and Behaviours in Adolescents: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.Clinical psychology & psychotherapyPooled it
- Adaptive functioning at age 18 years following severe early deprivation: Results of a randomized controlled trial.Developmental psychology · 2026Trial
- Early psychosocial deprivation alters the refinement of neural dynamics across adolescence.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Trial
- Intergenerational patterns of attachment in custodial grandfamilies.Journal of family psychology : JFP : journal of the Division of Family Psychology of the American Psychological Association (Division 43) · 2023Trial
- Early deprivation alters structural brain development from middle childhood to adolescence.Science advances · 2022Trial
- Functional connectivity of youth in family-like residential care in Japan: Impact of reactive attachment disorder and disinhibited social engagement disorder symptoms.Neuroimage. Reports · 2026Article
- Identifying cognitive, affective, and developmental mechanisms linking threat and deprivation with adolescent psychopathology.Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines · 2025Article
- Family adversity and co-occurring pain, psychological, and somatic symptom trajectories from late childhood through early adolescence.Social science & medicine (1982) · 2025Article
- Caregiving Quality Across Development and Secure Base Knowledge among Adolescents with a History of Institutional Care.Adversity and resilience science · 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
- Linking caregiving quality during infancy to brain activity in early childhood and later executive function.Developmental science · 2024Article
- Revisiting adolescence as a sensitive period for sociocultural processing.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2024Review
- Environmental contributions to cognitive development: The role of cognitive stimulation.Developmental review : DR · 2024Article
- Impacts of early deprivation on behavioral and neural measures of executive function in early adolescence.Brain and cognition · 2024Article
- Childhood adversity is associated with reduced BOLD response in inhibitory control regions amongst preadolescents from the ABCD study.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2024Article
- Recalibration of the stress response system over adult development: Is there a perinatal recalibration period?Development and psychopathology · 2023Review
- Leveraging the developmental neuroscience of caregiving to promote resilience among youth exposed to adversity.Development and psychopathology · 2023Article
- Peer facilitation of emotion regulation in adolescence.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2023Review
- Puberty initiates a unique stage of social learning and development prior to adulthood: Insights from studies of adolescence in wild chimpanzees.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2022Article
- Poverty, Cortical Structure, and Psychopathologic Characteristics in Adolescence.JAMA network open · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
9 authors at 9 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundAdolescence has been proposed to be a period of heightened sensitivity to environmental influence. If true, adolescence may present a window of opportunity for recovery for children exposed to early-life adversity. Recent evidence supports adolescent recalibration of stress response systems following early-life adversity. However, it is unknown whether similar recovery occurs in other domains of functioning in adolescence.
methodsWe use data from the Bucharest Early Intervention Project - a randomized controlled trial of foster care for children raised in psychosocially depriving institutions - to examine the associations of the caregiving environment with reward processing, executive functioning, and internalizing and externalizing psychopathology at ages 8, 12, and 16 years, and evaluate whether these associations change across development.
resultsHigher quality caregiving in adolescence was associated with greater reward responsivity and lower levels of internalizing and externalizing symptoms, after covarying for the early-life caregiving environment. The associations of caregiving with executive function and internalizing and externalizing symptoms varied by age and were strongest at age 16 relative to ages 8 and 12 years. This heightened sensitivity to caregiving in adolescence was observed in both children with and without exposure to early psychosocial neglect.
conclusionsAdolescence may be a period of heightened sensitivity to the caregiving environment, at least for some domains of functioning. For children who experience early psychosocial deprivation, this developmental period may be a window of opportunity for recovery of some functions. Albeit correlational, these findings suggest that it may be possible to reverse or remediate some of the lasting effects of early-life adversity with interventions that target caregiving during adolescence.
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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.