# Intergenerational Transmission of Deficits In Self-Regulatory Control

> **NIH NIH R01** · COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY HEALTH SCIENCES · 2022 · $743,362

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY
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 ur-
ban medical center, a sample that is underrepresented in U.S. biomedical research and facing significant psy-
chosocial adversity. Age-appropriate measures of regulatory control processes will be acquired from their off-
spring at 4- and 14-months and during preschool and school age, including resting-state fMRI data from neo-
nates 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 develop-
ment of regulatory control across the first decade of life. This study also supports both the NIH BRAIN and pre-
cision 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:** 10409776
- **Project number:** 5R01MH117983-05
- **Recipient organization:** COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY HEALTH SCIENCES
- **Principal Investigator:** RACHEL MARSH
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2022
- **Award amount:** $743,362
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2018-09-01 → 2024-06-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10409776

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10409776, Intergenerational Transmission of Deficits In Self-Regulatory Control (5R01MH117983-05). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10409776. Licensed CC0.

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