Measuring stress-related responding using a natural model

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Stress is a part of life and responding appropriately to stressors is necessary for survival. There is a lot of individual variability in stress responding and also in the incidence of stress-related diseases, such as mood disorders. The main goal of my research is to investigate the role that specific sources of variability play so that we can better understand what makes some people susceptible to stress-related dysfunction, while others appear resilient. One source of variability that we investigate is sex. There are sex differences in the effects of stress and in the incidence/presentation of stress-related diseases. Over the years, we have made important contributions to this field and will continue investigating how and why males and females differ in stress responding. More recently, we have been examining the role that higher order brain regions play in individual variability in stress responding. Such brain regions are involved in perceiving if a particular situation is stressful and play a large part in telling 'lower' brain regions to begin the process of releasing stress hormones that act on various parts of the body. One of these brain regions continues to develop throughout adolescence and we have shown that stress exposure during adolescence has long-term effects on adult stress responding. In the current set of experiments, we will investigate whether adolescent stress affects this brain region and if that is associated with the long-term effects on stress responding.