This K99/R00 awardee seeks to dedicate her research program to understanding how partnerships evolve across adulthood and, in turn, shape the biological cascade to healthy aging and disease. Inflammation is a complex immune process central to many diseases of aging. With the mentorship of renowned experts in psychoneuroimmunology (PNI), the K99 training has supplemented the candidate?s expertise in adult development and couples? relationships with a foundation in PNI, particularly inflammation and immunosenescence, to better equip her to investigate disease processes that commonly afflict aging couples. Chronic inflammation is a hallmark of paths leading to early functional decline, diseases of aging (cardiovascular disease, metabolic syndrome), and death. Inflammatory responses to stress also become dysregulated as the immune system ages, and thus increase age-related vulnerability to decline. On the other hand, emotion theories of aging have emphasized the emotion-regulation advantages gained with life lived. Older adults? ability to avoid or reframe some stressors provides a way to circumvent the stress-related health risks that age exacerbates. This proposal probes age differences in inflammatory responses to couple conflict and partner emotional disclosure, a novel context important for older adults. These studies will also test an unexamined mechanism of context-dependent age risks, autonomic synchrony (e.g., how closely partners? heart rates sync). The R00 study will replicate and extend the K99 study protocol by focusing on a primary precursor to inflammatory responses: changes in immune-related gene expression. Consistent with prior research, it is predicted that older adults will behave less negatively in conflict than younger partners, and in turn, greater negativity will relate to stronger synchrony with the spouse. Negative behavior and autonomic synchrony will be linked to increases in proinflammatory gene expression, and these effects will be stronger for older adults than younger adults.
The second aim will examine the same processes in the context of listening to partners? emotional disclosure. Unlike conflict, it is predicted that one partner?s need to share suffering will motivate the listening partner to remain engaged, regardless of age. Thus, without active avoidance, listening to a partner disclose may exact particularly high inflammatory costs in older adults. After setting up her lab and launching the R00 study, the candidate will submit an R01 proposal in the second year of the three-year project, using results from the K99 and R00 studies as key preliminary data.
The proposed research will illuminate marriage?s contributions to inflammation, a hallmark of age-related disease, functional decline, and death, as a function of age. Studies will examine couples? inflammatory responses to conflict and partner disclosure, a central interaction context for aging couples, and test a promising physiological mechanism, autonomic synchrony between partners.
