Skip to main content
Go to the home page of the European Commission (opens in new window)
English en
CORDIS - EU research results
CORDIS

Uncovering Child-to-Parent Depression and Anxiety Transmission: Behavioural, Hormonal and Neural Mechanisms

Objective

The saying “you can only be as happy as your least happy child” reflects an intuitive understanding that children's distress profoundly impacts parents. Alarmingly, ~40% of youth (children and adolescents) experience elevated internalizing (depression/anxiety) symptoms. While research has focused predominantly on parent-to-child symptom transmission, emerging evidence suggests that the opposite direction is also possible. However, no theoretical model explains child-to-parent transmission, limiting our understanding of family mental health dynamics and compromising interventions.
Child2Parent proposes the first model for child-to-parent transmission by focusing on a dyadic biobehavioural mechanism, the coregulation sequence, during which youth with high internalizing symptoms signal distress maladaptively (e.g. hostile support-seeking) and are less responsive to parents’ coregulation attempts, resulting in parents' experience of failure; simultaneously, parent-youth neurobiological synchrony in stress-regulation systems creates a substrate for stress contagion. These behavioural and neurobiological components accumulate over time and increase parent internalizing symptoms.
Using a multimethod approach, I will (1) Experimentally test how youth with high vs. low internalizing symptoms differently impact parents’ immediate hormonal, neural, and behavioural responses through the coregulation sequence. (2) Longitudinally test whether hormonal/neural responses in the lab predict everyday coregulation disruptions, and whether these disruptions accumulate and lead to increases in parents’ internalizing symptoms. (3) Examine whether parents with high (vs. low) internalizing symptoms are more vulnerable to coregulation disruptions.
Child2Parent will open a new perspective to our understanding of mental health in families, and may apply to other disorders (e.g. externalizing), developmental periods (e.g. infancy) and relationships (e.g. romantic couples).

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.

This project has not yet been classified with EuroSciVoc.
Be the first one to suggest relevant scientific fields and help us improve our classification service

You need to log in or register to use this function

Keywords

Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)

Programme(s)

Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.

Topic(s)

Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.

Funding Scheme

Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.

HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants

See all projects funded under this funding scheme

Call for proposal

Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.

(opens in new window) ERC-2026-STG

See all projects funded under this call

Host institution

BAR ILAN UNIVERSITY
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 1 973 365,00
Address
BAR ILAN UNIVERSITY CAMPUS
52900 Ramat Gan
Israel

See on map

Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 1 973 365,00

Beneficiaries (1)