Doctoral Dissertation Research: Effects of Extreme Stressors in Adolescence

University Of Washington, Seattle WA

Investigators

Abstract

Extreme stress experienced during adolescence may adversely affect a person’s development, health, and physiology. Variation in which individuals respond to stressors can offer insight into developmental plasticity and its outcomes, in addition to understanding impacts on individual trajectories. The degree to which these stressors exert influence among individuals, and the persistence of this influence, is debated. This doctoral dissertation research project examines how stress due to forced displacement and poverty impact variation in hormone levels in adolescence, to better understand how the timing and experience of such stressors impact development, metabolism, and shape the stress response – which impacts how individuals cope with future stressors. The results of this research offer perspective on how stress reduction programs may help shape resilient responses in adolescents experiencing adverse life events, and further offer valuable insight into the impacts of lived experience during a critical developmental period. Evolutionary social scientists suggest early life adversity may accelerate or suppress pubertal development in the presence of high psychosocial stress. A developmental perspective suggests that testosterone and cortisol will increase in tandem to facilitate reproductive development in puberty, and predicts that they should be dissociated prior to puberty, positively associated in early adolescence, and then become less positively associated in adulthood. This study explores whether psychosocial stress impacts the average timing at which adolescents reach adult hormone levels, as measured by the timing and nature of the relationship between cortisol and testosterone. Specifically, this project explores whether greater psychosocial stress is associated with earlier pubertal development among adolescents who have experienced extreme stress. Through the measurement of variation in cortisol and testosterone in archived dried blood spot samples from a previously conducted mixed-age randomized control trial that included an 8-week community-based stress-reduction intervention program, the results of this research contribute to a better understanding of the consequences of extreme stressors on adolescent development. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.