The Michigan Interdisciplinary Center on Social Inequalities, Mind, and Body (MICSIMB), will foster an interdisciplinary research program seeking to understand the interactions of psychosocial states (beliefs, attitudes, affective states, values, and social relationships), their determinants, stress, and pathophysiologic marker of stress, in the development of physical and mental disorders, in child development, and in aging. The investigators include a focus on socioeconomic and racial inequalities in health, and on lifecourse and community determinants in community-based samples of children and adults, men and women, and minorities. The projects represent novel, cost-effective, and interrelated investigations of: (1) the extent to which children's physical, emotional, and cognitive status reflect the influence of parental socioeconomic status, income trajectories economic stress, and community characteristics; (2) the role of glucocorticoid and serotonergic mechanisms in the associations between psychosocial states, SES, and excess risk for CVD; (3) the interrelations between a broad array of psychological attributes, their antecedents and health sequelae, and related biological markers of stress, within a multilevel representative community sample, utilizing state of the art assessment of community factors; (4) contributions of socioeconomic, biological, and psychosocial factors at different stages of the life course to a broad range of indicators of psychosocial well-being, cardiovascular risk factors, subclinical and diagnosed CVD in adulthood, using data reflecting over 50 years of assessments; and, (5) the impact of chronic economic stress, in situ, on health and function in a randomly selected cohort of poor women with young children who, as part of welfare reform, were moved from the AFDC roles in Michigan into a new """"""""workfare"""""""" program. The development and utilization of new methodological and biostatistical tools, career development, and dissemination activities coupled with the above research program will help to further establish the MICSIMB as a major international center for the study of mind/body interactions and physical health and mental health, cardiovascular disease, aging, and child development. This will be accomplished by a team of 21 experienced researchers from nine disciplines who will come together in a symbiotic way on five research projects and efforts to expand the methodological and biostatistical tools available for such analyses.
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