Heightened sensitivity to the caregiving environment during adolescence: implications for recovery following early‐life adversity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Adolescence 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. METHODS: We 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. RESULTS: Higher 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. CONCLUSIONS: Adolescence 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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".