Rachel Lean
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Psychology·Early-career
Children who struggle to control their attention and impulses are at higher risk for many psychiatric disorders. This ability, called effortful control, begins to develop in infancy, and the way parents care for a baby strongly predicts how well it develops.
- Fields
Psychology
Neuroscience
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
effortful control
self-regulation
executive attention
- Grants
- 1 known grant, last ended Oct 2026
What they work on
- Test whether maternal mind-mindedness, a mother's attunement to her infant's mental states, predicts later parenting sensitivity, using prospective observations of mother-infant interactions from birth to age 3.
- Determine whether mind-mindedness and parenting sensitivity relate to infant structural and functional brain connectivity in effortful-control networks, using repeated diffusion MRI and resting-state functional MRI.
- Chart the development of effortful control and executive attention in infancy, using a standardized infant attention test alongside repeated developmental evaluations in a poverty-enriched cohort.
- Examine whether perinatal poverty, depression, anxiety and stress affect effortful control indirectly, through mind-mindedness and infant brain connectivity, using longitudinal mediation analysis.
More about the research
A key open question is which parts of parenting shape the infant brain networks behind self-control, and whether those parts could be changed to prevent later problems.
Why it matters
Weak effortful control in early childhood raises risk for many psychiatric disorders. If a mother's attunement to her infant's mental states shapes brain wiring for self-control, infancy could be a window for prevention. The findings could help identify vulnerable infants, especially in families facing poverty, and could guide new parenting interventions that strengthen infant brain networks before problems emerge.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Ashley Nielsen
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Neuroscience·Early-career
Code parent-child interaction videos at age 1 to measure unpredictability in parents' sensory signals (visual, auditory, touch) and in their emotional signals (inconsistent nurturing or support).
Julie Wargo Aikins
Wayne State University, MI·Psychology
Test whether disrupted maternal representations of the child, measured with the Working Model of the Child Interview, stay stable from the third trimester of pregnancy to when the child is two years old, in 99 women living in high-risk settings.
Helen Kamens
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Neuroscience
Test whether baseline resting-state functional connectivity, measured by rsfMRI in awake male and female C57BL/6J mice, predicts how much morphine each mouse later drinks voluntarily.
The school
Washington University in St Louis: 97 labs on PI Pages, $1.2B a year on research, 365 research doctorates a year.
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