Doctoral Dissertation Research: Stories at the Border of Mind and Body: Stress, Distress, and Diabetes among Mexican and Mexican-American Women in Chicago

博士生艾米丽·门登霍尔（西北大学）将在丽贝卡·塞利格曼博士的指导下，对疾病因果关系和控制的民间模型与心理和生理健康结果之间的关系进行研究。本研究通过调查创伤经历与心理和身体健康结果及其重叠的关系，有助于更广泛地理解身心相互作用。该研究将重点关注糖尿病，并将在居住在芝加哥的低收入墨西哥和墨西哥裔美国妇女中进行。这项研究建立在一小部分研究的基础上，这些研究表明，墨西哥人和墨西哥裔美国人经常将压力和情绪困扰与糖尿病的因果关系联系起来。研究人员将调查关于压力和经常创伤经历的疾病叙述的重要性可能揭示的不仅仅是“民间模式”和/或非生物医学信仰。研究人员将通过糖尿病生活方式问卷、人体测量、生物标志物、精神病学调查和深入的定性访谈来收集数据，以(1)确定个人如何在健康叙述中传达心理和社会痛苦；(2)探讨创伤暴露与糖尿病女性心理健康的关系；(3)研究糖尿病叙事中所报告的心理和社会痛苦、心理困扰和糖尿病结局之间的关系。通过对个体使用糖尿病作为痛苦习语的方式进行更细致的理解，研究人员将测量糖尿病叙事中揭示的痛苦如何刻在精神和身体上。这项研究很重要，因为它将有助于社会科学理论关于思想，文化和生物学之间的联系。它也适用于了解糖尿病预后好坏的个体之间的差异，并可能为干预提供新的方向。最后，支持这项研究也支持了对社会科学家的教育。

Doctoral student Emily Mendenhall (Northwestern University), supervised by Dr. Rebecca Seligman, will undertake research on the relationship between the folk models for disease causality and control, and psychological and physiological health outcomes. This research contributes to broader understandings of mind-body interactions by investigating the relationship of traumatic experiences both to mental and physical health outcomes, and their overlap.The research will focus on diabetes and will be conducted among low-income Mexican and Mexican-American women living in Chicago. The research builds upon a small body of research that demonstrates that Mexicans and Mexican-Americans often implicate stress and emotional distress in diabetes causality. The researcher will investigate the possibility that the significance of disease narratives about stressful and often traumatic experiences may reveal more than simply "folk models" and/or non-biomedical beliefs. The researcher will gather data through diabetes lifestyle questionnaires, anthropometric measures, biomarkers, psychiatric inventories, and in-depth qualitative interviews to (1) determine how individuals communicate psychological and social suffering in health narratives; (2) investigate the relationship between trauma exposure and mental health among women living with diabetes; and (3) examine the relationships among psychological and social suffering reported in diabetes narratives, psychological distress, and diabetes outcomes. By developing a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which individuals use diabetes as an idiom of distress, the researcher will measure how suffering revealed in diabetes narratives may be inscribed in both mind and body. The research is important because it will contribute to social scientific theory about the connections between mind, culture, and biology. It also has application to understanding differences between individuals with good and poor diabetes outcomes, and may suggest new directions for intervention. Finally, supporting this research supports the education of a social scientist.