ReviewJournal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines2024
Annual Research Review: The power of predictability - patterns of signals in early life shape neurodevelopment and mental health trajectories.
Review in Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 36 papers, 1 of them a synthesis 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
36 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- 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
- [Family Environmental Unpredictability and Adolescent Physiological and Psychological Health: The Buffering Role of Positive School Climate].Xin li xue bao. Acta psychologica Sinica · 2026Article
- Loss of pleasure (Anhedonia): A sex-dependent, cross-species consequence of unpredictable signals to the perinatal brain.Neurobiology of stress · 2026Article
- Exploring the impact of unpredictability of household resources on infant attention.Infant behavior & development · 2026Article
- Neighborhood risks, maternal parenting entropy, and child attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms.Journal of family psychology : JFP : journal of the Division of Family Psychology of the American Psychological Association (Division 43) · 2026Article
- Prenatal Origins of Stress Regulation: Maternal Psychological Distress and Inflammation During Pregnancy Prospectively Predict Infant Behavioral Reactivity and Regulation.Developmental psychobiology · 2026Article
- Developmental origins of ADHD: sex-specific influences of early life unpredictability on symptom profiles.Journal of developmental origins of health and disease · 2026Article
- The role of different forms of adverse childhood experiences in borderline personality disorder: results from a network analysis including clinical and non-clinical populations.Borderline personality disorder and emotion dysregulation · 2026Article
- Unpredictable caregiving is associated with disrupted neurophysiological measures of attention and autonomic function in three-month-old infants.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2026Article
- Anhedonia buffers the effects of early-life unpredictability on threat-reward decision-making.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Maternal depression across childhood and offspring young adult depression and anxiety: Testing adolescent emotion dynamics as transdiagnostic mechanisms.JCPP advances · 2026Article
- Unpredictable maternal signals and developmental profiles of child executive function from infancy to early childhood.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2026Article
- Everyday maternal sensitivity to distress is dynamic and systematically varies across contexts.Child development · 2026Article
- Maternal mood entropy and children's hippocampal development: Enduring versus transient effects.Development and psychopathology · 2026Article
- Evaluating oxidative stress marker FBMC pediatrics · 2026Article
- Anhedonia underlies the association between childhood unpredictability and adult PTSD symptoms: Evidence from three independent longitudinal cohorts.Psychological medicine · 2026Article
- Unpredictability is a childhood adversity that contributes to mental health problems.Nature. Mental health · 2026Article
- Article
- Investigating hierarchical critical periods in human neurodevelopment.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Review
- Prenatal maternal mood instability and child externalizing problems: An ecological momentary assessment study.Journal of affective disorders · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
- Commented on by
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The global burden of early life adversity (ELA) is profound. The World Health Organization has estimated that ELA accounts for almost 30% of all psychiatric cases. Yet, our ability to identify which individuals exposed to ELA will develop mental illness remains poor and there is a critical need to identify underlying pathways and mechanisms. This review proposes unpredictability as an understudied aspect of ELA that is tractable and presents a conceptual model that includes biologically plausible mechanistic pathways by which unpredictability impacts the developing brain. The model is supported by a synthesis of published and new data illustrating the significant impacts of patterns of signals on child development. We begin with an overview of the existing unpredictability literature, which has focused primarily on longer patterns of unpredictability (e.g. years, months, and days). We then describe our work testing the impact of patterns of parental signals on a moment-to-moment timescale, providing evidence that patterns of these signals during sensitive windows of development influence neurocircuit formation across species and thus may be an evolutionarily conserved process that shapes the developing brain. Next, attention is drawn to emerging themes which provide a framework for future directions of research including the evaluation of functions, such as effortful control, that may be particularly vulnerable to unpredictability, sensitive periods, sex differences, cross-cultural investigations, addressing causality, and unpredictability as a pathway by which other forms of ELA impact development. Finally, we provide suggestions for prevention and intervention, including the introduction of a screening instrument for the identification of children exposed to unpredictable experiences.
Indexed as
Identifiers
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.