# Intervening Early with Neglected Children: Key Behavioral and Neurobiological Outcomes in Adolescence

> **NIH NIH R01** · UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE · 2020 · $741,938

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY/ ABSTRACT
Parents serve as co-regulators for their young children, helping them regulate behaviors, emotions, and
physiology and supporting the development of healthy brain circuitry. Neglecting parents often fail to serve as
co-regulators, which has implications for young children’s self-regulatory capabilities and brain development.
As children become older, these difficulties with self-regulation may become more pronounced. Adolescence
represents a period of particular vulnerability for the emergence of mental health problems because of
increasing demands for regulation of emotions and behaviors, coupled with on-going development of neural
circuits that support emotional and behavioral regulation. In this competing renewal, we propose to follow
children into adolescence who initially participated in a randomized clinical trial design of Attachment and
Biobehavioral Catch-up (ABC) as infants, allowing us to experimentally assess plasticity and modification of
brain circuits and self-regulation as the result of an early intervention. The ABC intervention was designed to
help parents learn to interact in responsive and sensitive ways, with the expectation that children would show
enhanced ability to regulate behavior, emotions, and physiology. We assessed the efficacy of the ABC
intervention among parents involved with Child Protective Services (CPS). Parents were randomized to ABC or
to a control intervention. Children were followed at T1 (ages 1-4) and T2 (ages 8-10). At T1, more of the
children in the ABC group developed secure and organized attachments than children in the DEF group, and
children in ABC showed more normative production of cortisol, less expression of negative emotions, and
stronger inhibitory control than children in DEF. ABC parents were more sensitive and showed more optimal
neural activity than DEF parents. At T2, ABC children showed greater prefrontal cortex activation in response
to photographs of fearful faces than DEF children, suggesting better regulation to threat at the level of brain
activation. Also at T2, children in the ABC group reported more secure relationships with parents, and showed
more normative cortisol production and more optimal autonomic nervous system functioning than DEF
children. In adolescence, the ABC intervention is expected to result in enhanced brain circuitry and more
optimal functioning relative to the control intervention. In the proposed study, we will assess behavioral and
neurobiological development among 13-, 14- and 15-year-old adolescents whose parents were referred by
CPS to a randomized clinical trial in infancy (n=120), and among low-risk adolescents followed since middle
childhood (n=80). At each annual assessment, the primary constructs, inhibitory control, emotion regulation,
physiological regulation, and attachment/affiliation, will be assessed at the level of brain activation and circuitry,
and at the behavioral level.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 9984532
- **Project number:** 5R01MH074374-12
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE
- **Principal Investigator:** Mary Dozier
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $741,938
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2006-02-01 → 2024-05-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9984532

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 9984532, Intervening Early with Neglected Children: Key Behavioral and Neurobiological Outcomes in Adolescence (5R01MH074374-12). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-22 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/9984532. Licensed CC0.

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