Measuring stress-related responding using a natural model

压力是生活的一部分，对压力源做出适当的反应是生存所必需的。压力反应和与压力有关的疾病（如情绪障碍）的发病率存在很大的个体差异。我的研究的主要目标是调查变异性的特定来源所起的作用，以便我们能够更好地了解是什么使一些人容易受到压力相关功能障碍的影响，而另一些人则表现出弹性。我们调查的变异性的一个来源是性别。在压力的影响和与压力有关的疾病的发病率/表现方面存在性别差异。多年来，我们在这一领域做出了重要贡献，并将继续研究男性和女性在压力反应方面的差异。最近，我们一直在研究高阶脑区在压力反应的个体差异中所起的作用。这些大脑区域参与感知特定情况是否有压力，并在告诉“较低”的大脑区域开始释放作用于身体各个部位的压力激素的过程中发挥很大作用。其中一个大脑区域在整个青春期都在持续发育，我们已经证明，青春期的压力暴露对成年人的压力反应有长期影响。在目前的一组实验中，我们将研究青少年的压力是否会影响这个大脑区域，以及这是否与压力反应的长期影响有关。

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.