ArticleCurrent directions in psychological science2023
Romania's Abandoned Children: The Effects of Early Profound Psychosocial Deprivation on the Course of Human Development.
Article in Current directions in psychological science, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 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
12 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Home-Based Learning Opportunities, Responsive Caregiving and the Development of Preschool-Aged Children in Low- and Middle-Income Countries of the East Asia and Pacific Region: A Systematic Review.Child: care, health and development · 2026Pooled it
- Identifying differential interactions of potentially traumatic experiences with genetic risk for posttraumatic stress disorder.European journal of psychotraumatology · 2026Article
- Developmental Care in the Early Years in Pediatric Intensive Care Patients as a Strategy to Mitigate Pediatric Post-Intensive-Care Syndrome: A Narrative Review.Journal of intensive care medicine · 2026Review
- Role of Institutionalization in Interoception, Emotion Regulation, and Prosocial Behavior in Preschool Children.Brain sciences · 2026Article
- Prenatal stress, hormones, and fetal brain development: gender differences.Hormones (Athens, Greece) · 2026Review
- Retaining infants and young children who experience transitions in care in longitudinal studies of child health and development: Considerations from the HEALthy Brain and Child Development study.Infant mental health journal · 2026Review
- Investigating hierarchical critical periods in human neurodevelopment.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Review
- Working with Mind-Body-Brain in a Dyadic Treatment Through Embodied Witnessing to Heal Trauma of Human Origin.American journal of psychoanalysis · 2025Article
- Psychosocial, neurocognitive, and physical development in Eastern European adopted adolescents with and without fetal alcohol spectrum disorder.Alcohol, clinical & experimental research · 2025Article
- The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Pediatric Microbial Resistance Patterns and Abandonment Rates in Western Romania-An Interdisciplinary Study.Antibiotics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Lingering Effects of Early Institutional Rearing and Cytomegalovirus Infection on the Natural Killer Cell Repertoire of Adopted Adolescents.Biomolecules · 2024Article
- The impact of early life experiences on inhibitory control and working memory.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Understanding the impact that early psychosocial neglect has on the course of human development has implications for the millions of children around the world who are living in contexts of adversity. In the US, approximately 76% of cases reported to child protective services involve neglect; world-wide, there are more than 150 million orphaned or abandoned children, including 10.5 million orphaned because of COVID-19. In much of the world, children without primary caregivers are reared in institutional settings. We review two decades of research based on the only randomized controlled trial of foster care as an alternative to institutional care. We report that children randomly assigned to continued care as usual (institutional care) suffer from persistent deficits in social, cognitive, and emotional development, and show evidence of disruptions in brain development. By contrast, children randomly assigned to foster care show improvements in most domains of functioning, although the degree of recovery is in part a function of how old they were when placed into foster care and the stability of that placement. These findings have important implications for understanding critical periods in human development, as well as elucidating the power of the psychosocial environment in shaping multiple domains of human development.
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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.