Sylvia Lin and her colleagues at the Centre for Youth Mental Health of the University of Melbourne reported in JAMA Pediatrics on 27 October 2025 a randomized-control study of the effects of teaching mothers to help their pre-teen daughters learn to identify and regulate their emotions. They examined the effects of the parenting intervention on the children’s activation of neural structures when they performed emotional regulation tasks. On functional magnetic resonance imaging of the children’s neural activity conducted six months after the parent training, they found that the children of mothers who learned to use the parenting intervention (a) exhibited increased activity in the superior frontal gyrus during the implicit regulation task and (b) decreased acuity in inferior frontal gyrus during a explicit regulation task.
Here’s an image showing the what Lin and her associates did.
The young women were selected because they had self-reported scores above the 50th percentile on a measure of childhood anxiety and depression. Although the daughters reported fewer unsupportive maternal interactions, the authors did not report any changes in the girls’ observed behavior or ratings of their behavior by parents or teachers; they argued that they had already found that the intervention produced changes in externalizing and internalizing behavior problems in previous studies (Havighurst et al., 2015, Kehoe et al., 2014, respectively).
The superior and inferior angular gyrus (gyri?) are part of the prefrontal cortes in the brain. They are important in how people learn to fear things and to diminish fearful responses.
The “Tuning in to Teens” intervention helps adolescents label emotions, facilitates problem-solving, and reduces dismissive emotional responses. Readers interested in the program can learn more about it from a published training. manual (Havighurst et al., 2019). By measuring blood oxygenation levels via MRI in those areas, researchers can assess activation of those parts of the brain.
Comment
The authors of this study contend that learning about the neurobiological effects of their intervention will have them develop and refine the methods. That may be the case; I can imagine that they might use the results in that way.
I, however, would like to take the importance of this study in a different direction. I think it offers another example of how, when we teach children to do things, we are changing neural processes. We are taking advantage of neural plasticity to train the brain to do things differently. That is, modifying behavior is modifying brains.
We have ample demonstrations in reading, for example, that teaching kids how to read promotes increased blood flow in certain pasts of the brain. I made this point in my talk at the National Institute for Direct Instruction in 2023. Dan Willingham and I touched on the topic in our 2007 paper, too.
This may be a straw argument, but please consider it: I think we humans routinely suppose that brain functions cause behavior. I encourage us to think of that causal relationship in the opposite direction: Behavior causes brain functions.
References
Havighurst, S. S., Kehoe, C. E., & Harley, A. E. (2015). Tuning in to teens: Improving parental responses to anger and reducing youth externalizing behavior problems. Journal of Adolescence, 42, 148-158.
Havighurst, S. S., Harley, A. E., & Kehoe C. (2019). Tuning In to Teens: Emotionally intelligent parenting program manual. American Psychological Association.
Kehoe, C. E., Havighurst, S. S., & Harley, A. E. (2014). Tuning in to teens: Improving parent emotion socialization to reduce youth internalizing difficulties. Social Development, 23(2), 413-431.
Lin, S. C., Kehoe, C. E., Zhao, J., Havighurst, S. S., Schwartz, O. S., Yap, M. B. H., Pozzi, E., & Whittle, S. (2025). Brain changes after a parenting intervention in adolescent girls with internalizing symptoms: A randomized clinical trial. JAMA Pediatrics. 27 October 2025. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamapediatrics.2025.3845
Willingham, D. T., & Lloyd, J. W. (2007). How educational theories can use neuroscientific data. Mind, Brain, & Education, 1, 140-149. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-228X.2007.00014.x
As John Locke explained, “Nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses.”