ArticleCurrent directions in psychological science2021
Caregiving Influences on Development: A Sensitive Period for Biological Embedding of Predictability and Safety Cues.
Article in Current directions in psychological science, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 57 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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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.
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Who cites it
57 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 97 citations in OpenAlex.
- Depression in youths with early life adversity: a systematic review and meta-analysis.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2024Pooled it
- Socially-supported sleep in older adults aged 50 and older: a concept analysis.Frontiers in public health · 2024Pooled it
- Early deprivation alters structural brain development from middle childhood to adolescence.Science advances · 2022Trial
- 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
- Long-term molecular embedding of early life adversity: leukocyte DNA methylation and gene expression associations from childhood to young adulthood.Epigenomics · 2026Article
- Neurodevelopmental impacts of unique postnatal adversity subgroups in children with prenatal alcohol exposure.Child neuropsychology : a journal on normal and abnormal development in childhood and adolescence · 2026Article
- Parental Companionship Shapes Children's Attentional Functions and Academic Achievement.Child psychiatry and human development · 2026Article
- Prenatal stress, excitatory-inhibitory imbalance, and ADHD risk: a hypothesis-driven perspective on psilocybin-induced neuroplasticity.Translational psychiatry · 2026Review
- Maternal experiences of home care for young children with tracheostomies in South Korea: a qualitative descriptive study.Child health nursing research · 2026Article
- Acceptability of Neuroimaging and Hormonal Biomarker Collection in Early Behavioral Intervention Research.Maternal and child health journal · 2026Article
- Unpredictable maternal signals and developmental profiles of child executive function from infancy to early childhood.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2026Article
- Editorial: Neuroprotection Across Generations: Maternal Childhood Trauma and the Developing Amygdala.Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry · 2026Article
- Multimodal correlates of socioemotional movie-watching and their associations with internalizing symptoms in childhood and adulthood.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Article
- Investigating hierarchical critical periods in human neurodevelopment.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Review
- Early life shifts in cortical inhibitory-excitatory balance underlies sensitive periods and skill development.Frontiers in cellular neuroscience · 2026Article
- Predicting Child Development Across Literacy, Physical, Learning, and Social-Emotional Domains Using Supervised Machine Learning: A Cross-Sectional Study Based on MICS 2019 Bangladesh.Health science reports · 2025Article
- Tracing the Cognitive-Motor Connection: Prospective-Longitudinal Associations Between Early Parent-Toddler Literacy Activities and Subsequent Gross Motor Skills at School Entry.Children (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Article
- The epigenetic impacts of pubertal acceleration following early caregiver disruptions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- From Storytime to Success: Prospective Longitudinal Associations Between Toddler Literacy Enrichment and Long-Term Student Engagement in a Millennial Birth Cohort of Boys and Girls.Journal of Intelligence · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Across species, caregivers exert a powerful influence on the neural and behavioral development of offspring. Increasingly, both animal and human research has highlighted specific patterns in caregivers' behavior that may be especially important early in life, as well as neurobiological mechanisms linking early caregiving experiences with long-term affective behavior. Here we delineate evidence for an early sensitive period during infancy and toddlerhood when caregiver inputs that are predictable and associated with safety may become biologically embedded via influences on corticolimbic circuitry involved in emotion regulation. We propose that these caregiver signals prime corticolimbic circuitry to be receptive to later stage-specific caregiver influences, such as caregivers' external regulation of children's emotional reactivity. Following caregiving adversity that disrupts predictability and safety associated with caregivers during this sensitive period, accelerated maturation of corticolimbic circuitry may foreshorten the protracted period of plasticity and caregiver influence that is characteristic of humans. This work has implications for both prevention and intervention efforts for children exposed to early life adversity.
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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.