ArticleNeuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology2022
A cross-species assay demonstrates that reward responsiveness is enduringly impacted by adverse, unpredictable early-life experiences.
Article in Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 39 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
39 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 44 citations in OpenAlex.
- Enduring effects of early-life adversity on reward processes: A systematic review and meta-analysis of animal studies.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2022Pooled it
- Nociceptin orphanin F/Q Pathways are dysregulated by stress and modulate reward responsiveness and motivated behavior across species.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Article
- Temporal reorganization of maternal care during early life stress in mice.Neurobiology of stress · 2026Article
- Loss of pleasure (Anhedonia): A sex-dependent, cross-species consequence of unpredictable signals to the perinatal brain.Neurobiology of stress · 2026Article
- Ketamine and Evolving Neuroplasticity.Clinical drug investigation · 2026Review
- Probing biomarkers and clinical utility of reward learning across species using the Probabilistic Reward Task: 20 years of findings.Nature. Mental health · 2026Article
- Ketamine Improves Anhedonic Phenotypes Across Species: Translational Evidence From the Probabilistic Reward Task.Biological psychiatry global open science · 2026Article
- Peptide signaling in the paraventricular thalamus contributes to disrupted adult reward behaviors after early-life adversity.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Anhedonia underlies the association between childhood unpredictability and adult PTSD symptoms: Evidence from three independent longitudinal cohorts.Psychological medicine · 2026Article
- Reverse Translation.Perspectives on behavior science · 2026Article
- Sex and Stress Govern the Function and Innervation of a Basolateral Amygdala to Nucleus Accumbens Corticotropin-Releasing Hormone/GABA-Expressing Projection.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- The development of translational tasks for preclinical psychedelic research in psychiatry.Journal of psychopharmacology (Oxford, England) · 2026Review
- Neurobiology of resilience to early life stress.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Review
- Prefrontal cortex development and its implications in mental illness.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Review
- Social circuits under developmental threat: Bridging rodent and human neuroscience.Developmental review : DR · 2025Article
- Lost in translation: toward clinically effective translational research.Translational psychiatry · 2025Review
- Aberrant neural event segmentation during a continuous social narrative in trauma-exposed older adolescents and young adults.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
- Environmental determinants of ketamine's prohedonic and antianhedonic efficacy: Persistence of enhanced reward responsiveness is modulated by chronic stress.The Journal of pharmacology and experimental therapeutics · 2025Article
- Molecular design of a therapeutic LSD analogue with reduced hallucinogenic potential.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Sex- and reward-dependent effects of early life scarcity-adversity on adolescent behavioral responses to natural rewards.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Exposure to early-life adversity (ELA) is associated with several neuropsychiatric conditions, including major depressive disorder, yet causality is difficult to establish in humans. Recent work in rodents has implicated impaired reward circuit signaling in anhedonic-like behavior after ELA exposure. Anhedonia, the lack of reactivity to previously rewarding stimuli, is a transdiagnostic construct common to mental illnesses associated with ELA. Here, we employed an assay of reward responsiveness validated across species, the Probabilistic Reward Task (PRT). In the PRT, healthy participants reliably develop a response bias toward the more richly rewarded stimulus, whereas participants with anhedonia exhibit a blunted response bias that correlates with current and future anhedonia. In a well-established model of ELA that generates a stressful, chaotic, and unpredictable early-life environment, ELA led to blunted response biases in the PRT in two separate cohorts, recapitulating findings in humans with anhedonia. The same ELA rats had blunted sucrose preference, further supporting their anhedonic-like phenotypes. Probing the aspects of ELA that might provoke these deficits, we quantified the unpredictability of dam/pup interactions using entropy measures and found that the unpredictability of maternal care was significantly higher in the ELA groups in which PRT and sucrose preference reward deficits were present later in life. Taken together, these data position the PRT, established in clinical patient populations, as a potent instrument to assess the impact of ELA on the reward circuit across species. These findings also implicate the unpredictability of maternal signals during early life as an important driver of reward sensitivity deficits.
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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.