Doctoral Dissertation Research: Child Health and the Proximal Ecology of Stress: Scheduling American Family Life

“压力”及其在适应和健康中的作用是生物人类学中理解人类变异的核心。我们对压力对身体的影响有很好的衡量标准，对社会压力的一般来源也有很好的生态模型。然而，需要更多地注意社会和认知机制，其中一个转化为另一个。行为生态学家的工作，虽然主要集中在最终的进化原因和适应性权衡，但表明我们可以通过关注在任何行为中消耗的两种“资源”的部署来解决这个问题：时间和精力。此外，在关注儿童生态压力的发展主义者中，有一种比较环境“微生态”的传统，这些环境“微生态”建立了不同的发展生态及其相应的结果。结合这些科学传统，本研究使用自然实验模型来考虑生态社会压力如何转化为儿童健康。研究表明，美国人的“时间限制”是一种主要的压力源，这可能与工作和生活安排的变化有关。本研究将详细检视亚特兰大市家庭的实际时间使用情况，以及家庭对时间使用的看法。这些数据与压力和兴奋的激素标记以及功能性儿童健康结果的记录相结合，包括身体、心理、社会和教育结果。这些结果与家庭日常安排的各种特征之间的联系被考虑在内，包括紧张、密度和脆弱性。这将通过详细介绍将社会生态学与生理学和儿童健康联系起来的特定生物文化途径，扩展我们对“压力”日常运作的理解。这项研究将产生许多更广泛的影响。第一，它将协助训练一名生物/体质人类学领域的研究生。其次，收集到的信息有助于我们更好地理解“社会心理压力”与维持可接受的“工作/生活平衡”之间的关系。维持“工作与生活的平衡”最近在科学界内外引起了极大的兴趣，包括在商界，这对维持一支运转良好、因而富有成效的劳动力队伍至关重要。最后，它将帮助我们更好地理解“压力”本身的概念，这一概念具有广泛的含义，因为“压力”与个人健康和幸福有关，更间接地与校园枪击、离婚和虐待儿童等社会现象有关，但往往对压力在人们的日常生活中如何运作缺乏充分的了解。

"Stress" and its role in adaptation and health are central to understanding human variation within biological anthropology. We have good measures of the effects of stress on the body, and good ecological models of general sources of social stress. Nonetheless, greater attention is needed to the social and cognitive mechanisms by which one translates into the other. The work of behavioral ecologists, while largely focused on ultimately evolutionary causes and adaptive trade-offs, nonetheless suggests that we might approach this through a focus on the deployment of two types of "resources" expended in any behavior: time and energy. Further, amongst developmentalists who focus upon ecologic stress in children, there is a tradition of comparing environmental "microniches" that set up different developmental ecologies and their corresponding outcomes. Combining these scientific traditions, this study uses a natural experimental model to consider how ecologic social stress translates into child health. Research suggests that the American "time bind" is experienced as a major stressor, and this may be related to changing work and living arrangements. This study will examine in detail the actual usage of time within metropolitan Atlanta families and families' perception of their use of time. These data are combined with hormonal markers of stress and arousal, and records of functional child health outcomes, including physical, psychological, social, and educational outcomes. The links between these outcomes and various characteristics of the daily schedules of families are considered, including tension, density, and fragility. This will extend our understanding of the day-to-day workings of "stress" by detailing specific biocultural pathways connecting social ecology to physiology and child health. The research will have a number of broader impacts. First, it will assist in the training of a graduate student in the field of biological/physical anthropology. Second, the information gathered helps us to better understand the relationship between "psychosocial stress" and the challenge of maintaining an acceptable "work/life balance." The maintenance of "work/life balance" has been of tremendous recent interest inside and outside the scientific community, including in business, where this is crucial to maintaining a well-functioning and thus productive work force. Finally, it will help us better understand the notion of "stress" itself, which has wide-ranging implications, since "stress" has been linked to personal health and well-being, and more indirectly to such social phenomena as school shootings, divorce, and child abuse, but often without sufficient understanding of how stress operates in people's daily lives.