# INTERGENERATIONAL TRANSMISSION OF DEFICITS IN SELF-REGULATORY CONTROL

> **NIH NIH R01** · COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY HEALTH SCIENCES · 2021 · $41,146

## Abstract

Self-regulatory deficits are common across a variety of childhood psychiatric disorders in which
children have difficulty regulating their thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. By leveraging
previously collected prenatal and neonatal data and acquiring new data from mother-infant
dyads, this study will identify circuit-based markers of regulatory deficits that are passed inter-
generationally and persist from infancy to childhood. We will enroll 15-45 year-old pregnant
women/mothers, approximately 75% Latina, who are receiving health care from our urban
medical center, a sample that is underrepresented in U.S. biomedical research and facing
significant psychosocial adversity. Age-appropriate measures of regulatory control processes
will be acquired from their offspring at 4- and 14-months and during preschool and school age,
including resting-state fMRI data from neonates and both resting and task-based fMRI data from
school-aged children who were previously scanned as neonates. Behavioral measures of
regulatory capacity and resting and task-based fMRI will also be acquired from the mothers,
allowing us to associate maternal-neonatal indices of self-regulatory control. Thus, this study
will uncover trajectories of control processes and circuits from infancy to school age and the
intergenerational transmission of regulatory deficits from mothers to offspring. Findings will set
the stage for future research aimed at engaging these circuits as targets for strategies to
prevent the risk for future maladaptive behaviors and at identifying prenatal mechanisms
underlying the intergenerational transmission of regulatory deficits, such as epigenetic and
stress-mediated biological alterations. This study supports the NIMH strategic objective
to chart mental illness trajectories to determine when, where, and how to intervene by
elucidating the development of regulatory control across the first decade of life. This study also
supports both the NIH BRAIN and precision medicine initiatives by evaluating the functional
organization of control circuits across family generations and longitudinally, as well as using a
novel imaging method to predict behavioral outcomes.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10306853
- **Project number:** 3R01MH117983-03S2
- **Recipient organization:** COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY HEALTH SCIENCES
- **Principal Investigator:** RACHEL MARSH
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $41,146
- **Award type:** 3
- **Project period:** 2018-09-01 → 2023-06-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10306853

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10306853, INTERGENERATIONAL TRANSMISSION OF DEFICITS IN SELF-REGULATORY CONTROL (3R01MH117983-03S2). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-28 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10306853. Licensed CC0.

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