Early Life Antecedents Predicting Adult Daily Affective Reactivity to Stress

When people experience stress, their positive emotions (e.g., joy, excitement, contentment) often decrease, and their negative emotions (e.g., anxiety, frustration, and anger) tend to increase. However, people vary in how much their emotions change with stress. This is called "daily affective reactivity to stress." Having greater affective reactivity is associated with poor outcomes including worse well-being, higher risks of mental and physical health problems, and dying earlier. This project investigates whether and how experiences during childhood, such as experiencing maltreatment and stress or receiving high quality parenting, predict daily affective reactivity to stress in adulthood. This project also investigates how the use of coping strategies in adulthood, such as seeking support, exercising, or using drugs or alcohol, might change or explain the links between childhood experiences and daily affective reactivity to stress in adulthood. The research informs the design of effective interventions for helping people respond constructively to daily stress. This project builds on the Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation, a longitudinal study that has followed a sample of people born into poverty for over 50 years. Now, with participants at age 50, this project has them complete 14 daily surveys reflecting on the stressful events that occur each day and how they respond in terms of positive and negative affect, support seeking, substance use, and exercise. These data are used to test whether early experiences predict daily affective reactivity to stress by looking at measures of maltreatment, life stress, and maternal sensitivity that were collected during the participants’ infancy and childhood. Two competing theoretical models of how early experiences shape adult stress reactivity are tested. The stress sensitization model proposes that adverse early experiences lead to greater reactivity to stressors in adulthood, with positive early experiences having protective effects. The stress inoculation model proposes that individuals with very high or very low early adversity will be more reactive to stress in adulthood, and individuals who experience moderate early adversity will be less reactive to stress. Detailed analyses of moderation and mediation effects determine whether tendencies to engage in support seeking, exercise, and substance use in response to stress change or explain links between early experiences and daily affective reactivity to stress. Results are shared with intervention and policy organizations to encourage application. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.