Effects of Stress on Brain and Physiological Pathways to Health Disparities - Project Summary Stress is a powerful biological force that fundamentally alters the brain and body and is a known important contributor to major adverse health outcomes like depression, anxiety and traumatic stress disorders, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and overall mortality. While empirical research examining the brain and physiological pathways linking stress to the aforementioned major health conditions is nascent, the specific mechanism by which different types of stressors exert their influences across diverse populations remains largely underexplored. This gap is particularly significant for populations in which exposure to stressors, such as economic hardship and interpersonal aggression, is notably high. Such investigation is essential because it will allow us to better characterize mechanistic pathways linking experiences with economic and interpersonal stressors to health disparities and to devise potential strategies for addressing such disparities. Repeated exposures to these stressors likely trigger and amplify a cascade of stress-related brain and physiological responses that are known to mediate elevated risk for adverse health outcomes. In this project, we will examine several elements of this mechanistic cascade. We aim to apply validated scientific paradigms in novel ways to examine brain, physiological, and psychological responses to the recollection of specific personal experiences with interpersonal aggression, compared to other types of life experiences, among groups who are living below the median income, given that stress associated with interpersonal aggression is more commonly experienced among these populations relative to others. We will also use prospective smartphone-based ecological momentary assessment (EMA) methods to measure the frequency and severity of experiences with interpersonal aggression as they occur in daily life in real time, and we will associate these measures with brain, physiological, and health outcomes. We will examine the relationship between brain/physiological responses to interpersonal aggression and health outcomes and functioning measures – such as psychological distress, cardiovascular disease risk, cellular aging (telomere length), coping, emotion regulation, and social support – and determine whether brain and physiological responses mediate the relationship between extent of exposure to interpersonal aggression and health outcomes. We have assembled an interdisciplinary team with expertise in areas including neuroimaging, trauma, biomarkers of stress, physiological perspectives on health disparities, ecological momentary assessment, emotion regulation, and the empirical study of interpersonal aggression among populations who experience economic hardship, yielding a collaborative effort that is unique and synergistic. It is an approach with the potential to transform the way that neuroscientists and psychologists conceptualize and study stressors that occur at the interpersonal level, helping to overcome some of the obstacles that have prevented previous scientific investigation of personal experiences with interpersonal aggression. Among our central aims is to increase the understanding of the mechanisms underlying health disparities in order to inform the development of targeted prevention and intervention strategies for populations disproportionately affected by stress, consistent with NIH goals.
