ReviewNeuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology2022
What's wrong with my experiment?: The impact of hidden variables on neuropsychopharmacology research.
Review 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 33 papers.
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
33 citing papers in PubMed, 52 citations in OpenAlex.
- Loss of pleasure (Anhedonia): A sex-dependent, cross-species consequence of unpredictable signals to the perinatal brain.Neurobiology of stress · 2026Article
- Effects of partial cage dividers on animal welfare and social behavior in California mice (Applied animal behaviour science · 2026Article
- Beyond Comfort: A Review of the Critical Role of Bedding Selection in Rodent Welfare, Microenvironment, and Research Reproducibility.Journal of the American Association for Laboratory Animal Science : JAALAS · 2026Review
- Social Housing of Postoperative Animals to Support Animal Welfare.Journal of the American Association for Laboratory Animal Science : JAALAS · 2026Review
- Neuron soma size and density measurements in rat striatal regions disaggregated by sex and estrous cycle phase.Brain structure & function · 2025Article
- An international Delphi consensus for reporting of setting in psychedelic clinical trials.Nature medicine · 2025Article
- Diet, diet access, and metabolic physiology as critically understudied factors in rodent models of alcohol intake: A commentary on Emous et al. (2025).Alcohol, clinical & experimental research · 2025Article
- Safety in treatment: Classical pharmacotherapeutics and new avenues for addressing maternal depression and anxiety during pregnancy.Pharmacological reviews · 2025Review
- Acute and vicarious effects of social defeat stress on social behaviour in California mice,Animal behaviour · 2025Article
- Sex differences in the social motivation of rats: Insights from social operant conditioning, behavioural economics, and video tracking.Biology of sex differences · 2024Article
- Neural cell-types and circuits linking thermoregulation and social behavior.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2024Review
- Beyond the binary: Characterizing the relationships between sex and neuropeptide receptor binding density measures in the rat brain.Hormones and behavior · 2024Article
- Impact of Long-Term Dietary High Fat and Eicosapentaenoic Acid on Behavior and Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal Axis Activity in Amyloidogenic APPswe/PSEN1dE9 Mice.Neuroendocrinology · 2024Article
- Using mice from different breeding sites fails to improve replicability of results from single-laboratory studies.Lab animal · 2024Article
- Early life stress shifts critical periods and causes precocious visual cortex development.PloS one · 2024Article
- Bedding as a variable affecting fasting blood glucose and vascular physiology in mice.American journal of physiology. Heart and circulatory physiology · 2023Article
- No detectable changes in anxiety-related and locomotor behaviors in adult ovariectomized female rats exposed to estradiol, the ERβ agonist DPN or the ERα agonist PPT.Hormones and behavior · 2023Review
- For neuroscience, social history matters.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2023Review
- Narrowing the translational research gap by aligning replication concepts in basic and clinical neuroscience.Journal of neuroscience methods · 2023Article
- Prepubertal ovariectomy confers resilience to stress-induced anxiety in adult female mice.Psychoneuroendocrinology · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
The field of neuropsychopharmacology relies on behavioral assays to quantify behavioral processes related to mental illness and substance use disorders. Although these assays have been highly informative, sometimes laboratories have unpublished datasets from experiments that "didn't work". Often this is because expected outcomes were not observed in positive or negative control groups. While this can be due to experimenter error, an important alternative is that under-appreciated environmental factors can have a major impact on results. "Hidden variables" such as circadian cycles, husbandry, and social environments are often omitted in methods sections, even though there is a strong body of literature documenting their impact on physiological and behavioral outcomes. Applying this knowledge in a more critical manner could provide behavioral neuroscientists with tools to develop better testing methods, improve the external validity of behavioral techniques, and make better comparisons of experimental data across institutions. Here we review the potential impact of "hidden variables" that are commonly overlooked such as light-dark cycles, transport stress, cage ventilation, and social housing structure. While some of these conditions may not be under direct control of investigators, it does not diminish the potential impact of these variables on experimental results. We provide recommendations to investigators on which variables to report in publications and how to address "hidden variables" that impact their experimental results.
Indexed as
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What Socratic 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 Socratic graph.