Research has established that there are a variety of biological and cultural factors that influence health outcomes and disparities. One of the major scientific challenges that remains is understanding how those factors change over time. This project takes up one such example in immigrant communities, who in the U.S. exhibit unique and somewhat paradoxical health trajectories. Initially their health profiles exceed expectations, but over time they decrease to mirror health disparity patterns found among U.S.-born populations. Typically, this has been theorized to be the product of acculturation and other environmental factors. In looking at differential psychological stress, this project, which trains a student in the methods of empirical, scientific data collection and analysis, asks whether there might be a biological dimension to this, measurable by assessing the influence of maternal stress on infants' stress response development. Considerable research shows that the early emotional environment can have a significant influence on how infants develop. In assessing how mothers' feelings of stress can lead to altered development of infants' stress responses, the findings will be disseminated to organizations that seek to improve mothers' stress in ways that can have repercussions on the function and wellbeing of the next generation. The project will provide information on the types of resources or programs immigrant mothers may need to ameliorate stress in small communities around the country.
Elizabeth Holdsworth, under the supervision of Dr. Lawrence Schell of the State University of New York at Albany, will explore what factors contribute to physiological stress, particularly acculturative stress, among immigrant women, how the local ecological context is embodied in the experience of stress, and to what extent maternal stress is transmitted transgenerationally, influencing infant stress response development. This project will interview immigrant mothers of infants living in the Capital Region of New York State who moved to the U.S. within the past five years. Immigrant mothers will complete questionnaires about perceived stress, acculturative stress, and other topics, as well as participate in semi-structured interviews to provide more information on what immigrant mothers identify as their most significant challenges and struggles. These responses will be associated with amounts of cortisol in mothers' hair, a measure of chronic stress response activation over the past three months, to determine which stressors lead to the greatest chronic physical stress in immigrant mothers. Saliva samples will also be collected from immigrant mother's infants before and after an injected vaccination to assess the change in cortisol production, a measure of stress response reactivity. Infant stress response extent will also be associated with mothers' reports of stress to determine which factors have the greatest influence on infant stress response development. Lastly, the investigators of this project will participate in local community events and observe programs to determine what resources are available to and accessed by immigrant mothers in the area that could improve or exacerbate stress. The project will contribute to debates in biocultural anthropology and other fields about the co-occurrence of acculturative and other forms of stress, the influence of psychosocial stress on health disparities, the influence of local ecology on stress exposure, and the relationship between postnatal maternal stress on infant stress response.
