Differential parental control of neural morphology in the offspring

EQ of both parents was significantly associated with EQ of the offspring (p<0.001 for maternal EQ and for paternal EQ). There was a highly significant positive correlation between maternal EQ and the child’s grey matter density in the two frontal lobes (Talaraich x,y,z coordinates: ±36, 68, 4; p<0.001, after correction for multiple comparisons using the familywise error procedure). These coordinates fall within Brodmann’s area 10 in the frontopolar prefrontal cortex, an area associated with the formulation of strategy and hypothesised to be important in food-sharing behaviour. We conducted an equivalent analysis for paternal EQ, but no voxels survived the cutoff for statistical significance of p<0.05 (corrected), and for the coordinates previously identified as significant in the maternal analysis, no voxels were significant for paternal EQ in uncorrected analyses. For each parent, the EQ of the other parent was then added to the model as a covariate. The results for maternal EQ remained highly significant (coordinates: ±34, 68, 3; p<0.001, corrected) following adjustment for paternal EQ (Figure 1), but paternal EQ remained unrelated to the outcome after adjusting for maternal EQ.