Can you believe it's almost the end of 2024?! Join me for a conversation with Dr. Aric Prather about stress, sleep, and social experiences at the holidays + what we know about links between those and our susceptibility to infections and severity of illness. We chatted about foundational knowledge drawn from studies where people are experimentally exposed to rhinovirus (aka the common cold) before moving to a conversation about health behaviors through the holidays. We hope this episode encourages you to indulge in social support and lean into the joy of this holiday season!

Dr. Aric Prather is a Professor and Pritzker Family Fund Endowed Chair in Health and Community in the Department of Psychiatry and Behaviroal Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. He co-directs the UCSF Aging, Metabolism, and Emotions Center, is the Director of the UCSF Center for Health and Community, and Associate Director of the Stress Measurement Network. His research focuses primarily on links between sleep and health, particularly immune health, and his work is regularly featured in the New York TImes, NPR, and the Today Show.

Topics Discussed:

• Psychoneuroimmunology
• Susceptibility to Illness
• Severity of Illness
• Health Behaviors
• Sleep and Health
• Glucocorticoid Resistance
• Common Cold/Rhinovirus
• Social Support
• Resilience and Self-Care

Research Mentioned:

• Cohen S. Keynote Presentation at the Eight International Congress of Behavioral Medicine: the Pittsburgh common cold studies: psychosocial predictors of susceptibility to respiratory infectious illness. Int J Behav Med. 2005;12(3):123-31.
• Prather, AA, Janicki-Deverts, D, Hall, MH, & Cohen, S. Behaviorally Assessed Sleep and Susceptibility to the Common Cold. Sleep. 2015;38(9):1353–1359.
• Cohen S, Janicki-Deverts D, Turner RB, Doyle WJ. Does hugging provide stress-buffering social support? A study of susceptibility to upper respiratory infection and illness. Psychol Sci. 2015 Feb;26(2):135-47.
• Access the Pittsburgh Common Cold Study data for yourself!
• Spiegel K, Rey AE, Cheylus A, Ayling K, Benedict C, Lange T, Prather AA, Taylor DJ, Irwin MR, Van Cauter E. A meta-analysis of the associations between insufficient sleep duration and antibody response to vaccination. Curr Biol. 2023 Mar 13;33(5):998-1005.e2.
• Newman DB, Gordon AM, Prather AA, Berry Mendes W. Examining Daily Associations Among Sleep, Stress, and Blood Pressure Across Adulthood. Ann Behav Med. 2023 May 23;57(6):453-462.

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The Stress Puzzle is hosted by Dr. Ryan L. Brown (https://www.ryanlinnbrown.com/) and
supported by the UCSF Stress Measurement Network, an NIH/NIA funded network which
aims to better understand the relationship between stress and health by improving the
measurement of stress in research studies. Learn more about available resources to support
stress research at: www.stressmeasurement.org.

Have burning questions about stress? Email us at stresspuzzlepod@gmail.com and we may
feature your question in a future episode!

Welcome back to the Stress Puzzle! This is the second of two episodes highlighting winners of the Stress Measurement Network's (SMN) Stress Science Paper Award. Today we'll hear from the lead author of the winning paper in the Human Empirical/Clinical category, Dr. Tené Lewis. We discussed the findings of their paper, which highlights the importance of stress experienced by close loved ones (e.g., family, friends) for African-American women's cardiovascular health. We also chatted about the strength of her team's methodology, how they disseminate the research to women who participated in their study, and the importance of these findings for conversations around self-care, care work (whether formal or informal), and the enormous responsibility that falls to women who end up as the social safety net.

Dr. Tené Lewis is a Professor in the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University where she studies health psychology and psychosocial epidemiology with an emphasis on cardiovascular health in women. Much of her research investigates the psychological and social factors underlying cardiovascular health disparities for African-American women compared to women of other racial or ethnic groups. Dr. Lewis’ research has been honored by the Health Psychology Division of the American Psychological Association, as well as the recently renamed Society for Biopsychosocial Science and Medicine. Her work has been featured by NPR, Essence Magazine, and the Washington Post.

SMN Stress Science Paper Award Winner (Human Empirical/Clinical):

• Lewis TT, Parker R, Murden R, Spikes T, Erving C, McKinnon II, Van Dyke ME, Booker B, Quyummi A, Vaccarino V, Moore RH. Network stressors, personal stressors, and ambulatory blood pressure in African-American women - Does Superwoman Schema Play a Role? Health Psychol. 2023 Jul;42(7):485-495. doi: 10.1037/hea0001309.

Topics Discussed:

• Network stressors vs. personal stressors
• Cardiovascular risk
• African American women’s health
• Social networks and social support
• Social safety nets
• Ambulatory blood pressure
• Superwoman Schema
• Dissemination
• Self-care
• Ecological validity

Additional Research Mentioned:

• Woods-Giscombé CL, Lobel M, Zimmer C, Wiley Cené C, Corbie-Smith G. Whose stress is making me sick? Network-stress and emotional distress in African-American women. Issues Ment Health Nurs. 2015;36(9):710-7. doi: 10.3109/01612840.2015.1011759. PMID: 26440874; PMCID: PMC7220100.
• Woods-Giscombé CL. Superwoman schema: African American women's views on stress, strength, and health. Qual Health Res. 2010 May;20(5):668-83. doi: 10.1177/1049732310361892. Epub 2010 Feb 12. PMID: 20154298; PMCID: PMC3072704.
• Work of Jasmine Abrams (e.g., Abrams JA, Hill A, Maxwell M. Underneath the Mask of the Strong Black Woman Schema: Disentangling Influences of Strength and Self-Silencing on Depressive Symptoms among U.S. Black Women. Sex Roles. 2019 May;80(9-10):517-526. doi: 10.1007/s11199-018-0956-y)
• Holding it Together: How women became America's safety net by Jessica Calcaro

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The Stress Puzzle is hosted by Dr. Ryan L. Brown (https://www.ryanlinnbrown.com/) and
supported by the UCSF Stress Measurement Network, an NIH/NIA funded network which
aims to better understand the relationship between stress and health by improving the
measurement of stress in research studies. Learn more about available resources to support
stress research at: www.stressmeasurement.org.

Have burning questions about stress? Email us at stresspuzzlepod@gmail.com and we may
feature your question in a future episode!

Welcome back to the Stress Puzzle! This is the first of two episodes highlighting winners of the Stress Measurement Network's (SMN) Stress Science Paper Award. Today we'll hear from the lead author of the winning paper in the Basic Science category, Dr. Natalia Bobba-Alves. We discussed the findings and implications of their paper (particularly around hypermetabolism, chronic stress, and accelerated cellular aging), directions to move the field forward, and how exciting of a moment it is for interdisciplinary stress science.

Dr. Natalia Bobba-Alves is a Postdoctoral Researcher working at the National Institute on Aging where she focuses on how stress signaling affects cellular energetics and aging. She received numerous awards that supported both her undergraduate and master’s degrees in Uruguay, and then was awarded a Fulbright Foreign Grant, which supported her PhD in Nutritional and Metabolic Biology at Columbia University in New York. There she worked with Dr. Martin Picard in the Mitochondrial PsychoBiology Lab to quantify the energetic cost of stress and the impact on cellular aging.

SMN Stress Science Paper Award Winner (Basic Science):

• Bobba-Alves, N., Sturm, G., Lin, J., Ware, S. A., Karan, K. R., Monzel, A. S., Bris, C., Procaccio, V., Lenaers, G., Higgins-Chen, A., Levine, M., Horvath, S., Santhanam, B. S., Kaufman, B. A., Hirano, M., Epel, E., & Picard, M. (2023). Cellular allostatic load is linked to increased energy expenditure and accelerated biological aging. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 155, 106322. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2023.106322

Topics Discussed:

• Allostasis/Allostatic load/Wear and Tear
• Chronic Stress
• Glucocorticoid signaling
• Cellular energy expenditure
• Mitochondria/mitochondrial psychobiology
• Homeostasis
• Hypermetabolism
• Social stress vs. molecular stress

Additional Research Mentioned:

• Sterling, P., & Eyer, J. (1988). Allostasis: A new paradigm to explain arousal pathology. In S. Fisher & J. Reason (Eds.), Handbook of life stress, cognition and health (pp. 629–649). John Wiley & Sons.
• Stress Puzzle episode with Dr. Michael Marmot
• Stress Puzzle episode with Dr. Jenny Tung
• Bobba-Alves N, Juster RP, Picard M. (2022) The energetic cost of allostasis and allostatic load. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 146:105951. doi: 10.1016/j.psyneuen.2022.105951.

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The Stress Puzzle is hosted by Dr. Ryan L. Brown (https://www.ryanlinnbrown.com/) and
supported by the UCSF Stress Measurement Network, an NIH/NIA funded network which
aims to better understand the relationship between stress and health by improving the
measurement of stress in research studies. Learn more about available resources to support
stress research at: www.stressmeasurement.org.

Have burning questions about stress? Email us at stresspuzzlepod@gmail.com and we may
feature your question in a future episode!

Welcome back to the Stress Puzzle! I had the joy of speaking with Dr. Jenny Tung, an evolutionary anthropologist and geneticist who discusses her intergenerational and experimental research showing how the social environment affects health and lifespan in non-human primates. She shared about her creative methods to experiment with social hierarchies and the special experience of collaborating with the other women who have led the Amboseli Baboon Research Project in Kenya. For more on human hierarchies and health, check out our last episode with Dr. Michael Marmot.

Dr. Jenny Tung is the Director of the Department of Primate Behavior and Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany and a Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology and Biology at Duke University. She co-directs the Amboseli Baboon Research Project, which started in 1971 and is one of the longest running primate field sites in the world located in Kenya. Dr. Tung investigates the genetic and genomic consequences of social environments in baboons, rhesus macaques, and other social mammals. She has advanced the science on social determinants of health by adding DNA analyses to the decades of behavioral observations in baboons to advance lifespan understanding of social influences on health. She has also combined these lifespan studies with creative experimental methods that provide greater causal evidence for the impact of the social environment and on health. Dr. Tung was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2019 for the depth and translational importance of her research. Learn more about Dr. Tung's research: http://www.tung-lab.org/

Topics Discussed:

• Social Hierarchies and Health in Non-Human Primates
• Lifespan Studies and Social Relationships
• Plasticity of the Immune System to Changes in Social Environment
• Methodological Challenges and Future Directions
• Intergenerational Effects of Social Environment
• Collaborative Research through the Amboseli Baboon Research Project

Papers Mentioned:

• Tung, J., Archie, E. A., Altmann, J., & Alberts, S. C. (2016). Cumulative early life adversity predicts longevity in wild baboons. Nature communications, 7(1), 11181. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms11181
• Zipple, M. N., Archie, E. A., Tung, J., Altmann, J., & Alberts, S. C. (2019). Intergenerational effects of early adversity on survival in wild baboons. Elife, 8, e47433. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.47433

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The Stress Puzzle is hosted by Dr. Ryan L. Brown (https://www.ryanlinnbrown.com/) and supported by the UCSF Stress Measurement Network, an NIH/NIA funded network which aims to better understand the relationship between stress and health by improving the measurement of stress in research studies. Learn more about available resources to support stress research at: www.stressmeasurement.org.

Have burning questions about stress? Email us at stresspuzzlepod@gmail.com and we may feature your question in a future episode!

Welcome back to the Stress Puzzle! For this episode, I was joined by Dr. Michael Marmot who is an expert on social status and health. We discussed his seminal work on the Whitehall Studies of British Civil Servants, translating research into policy, and how he remains an "evidence-based optimist" through it all. Tune in next month to hear about complementary research conducted by Dr. Jenny Tung on social status and health in nonhuman primates!

Dr. Michael Marmot is a Professor of Epidemiology at University College London, Director of the UCL Institute of Health Equity, and Past President of the World Medical Association. He has led multiple longitudinal cohort studies that have massively impacted our understanding of how social conditions influence health and aging, including the Whitehall Studies of British Civil Servants and the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing. Professor Marmot has also chaired the Commission on Social Determinants of Health for the World Health Organization and conducted a Strategic Review of Health Inequalities in England to produce evidence-based policy recommendations to support population health. He was recognized as a global health hero at the World Health Assembly in 2019.

Topics Discussed:

• Social determinants of health / health disparities
• Impact of social policy on health equity
• Challenges of policy implementation
• Prevention science

Research Mentioned:

• Fair Society, Health Lives: The Marmot Review: https://www.instituteofhealthequity.org/resources-reports/fair-society-healthy-lives-the-marmot-review/fair-society-healthy-lives-full-report-pdf.pdf
• Whitehall I: Marmot MG, Rose G, Shipley M, Hamilton PJ. Employment grade and coronary heart disease in British civil servants. J Epidemiol Community Health (1978). 1978 Dec;32(4):244-9. doi: 10.1136/jech.32.4.244. PMID: 744814; PMCID: PMC1060958. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/744814/
• Whitehall II: Marmot MG, Smith GD, Stansfeld S, Patel C, North F, Head J, White I, Brunner E, Feeney A. Health inequalities among British civil servants: the Whitehall II study. Lancet. 1991 Jun 8;337(8754):1387-93. doi: 10.1016/0140-6736(91)93068-k. PMID: 1674771. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1674771/
• Destitution in the UK: https://www.jrf.org.uk/deep-poverty-and-destitution/destitution-in-the-uk-2023

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The Stress Puzzle is hosted by Dr. Ryan L. Brown (https://www.ryanlinnbrown.com/) and
supported by the UCSF Stress Measurement Network, an NIH/NIA funded network which
aims to better understand the relationship between stress and health by improving the
measurement of stress in research studies. Learn more about available resources to support
stress research at: www.stressmeasurement.org.

Have burning questions about stress? Email us at stresspuzzlepod@gmail.com and we may
feature your question in a future episode!

Welcome to the first episode of the Stress Puzzle!

For this episode, I was joined by experts in the field of stress, Dr. Elissa Epel and Dr. Wendy Berry Mendes. Dr. Elissa Epel has focused on linking chronic stress to health, and Dr. Wendy Berry Mendes has focused on characterizing acute stress responses. They've been working together for over 10 years and have been co-leading the Stress Measurement Network. In this conversation, we discussed challenges and opportunities in the field of stress science, as well as the goals of this podcast.

Dr. Elissa Epel is a Professor and Vice Chair in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California San Francisco, where she also leads the Aging, Metabolism and Emotion center. She's one of the most cited researchers across fields for her research examining how psychological stress affects biological aging processes. Learn more about her research: https://www.elissaepel.com/

Dr. Wendy Berry Mendes is the Charles C. and Dorathea S. Dilley Professor in the Department of Psychology at Yale University, where she also leads the Emotion, Health and Psychophysiology lab. She's an international leader in social psychophysiology and has trained generations of students. She's a rigorous experimentalist, which has led to dozens of discoveries about the human social stress response. Her research on stress often goes beyond thinking about the individual to characterize how one person's stress impacts another person's emotions and physiology. Learn more about her research: https://www.wendyberrymendes.com/

Topics Discussed:

• Acute vs. Chronic Stress Responses
• NIH Stress Measurement Network
• Scientific Networks
• Wearables/Wearable Technology
• Stress Interventions
• Mind-Body Practices
• Future of Stress Science

Papers Mentioned:

• Crosswell, A. D., Mayer, S. E., Whitehurst, L. N., Picard, M., Zebarjadian, S., & Epel, E. S. (2024). Deep rest: An integrative model of how contemplative practices combat stress and enhance the body's restorative capacity. Psychological review, 131(1), 247–270. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000453
• Lin, J., & Epel, E. (2022). Stress and telomere shortening: Insights from cellular mechanisms. Ageing research reviews, 73, 101507. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.arr.2021.101507
• Newman, D. B., Gordon, A. M., Prather, A. A., & Berry Mendes, W. (2023). Examining Daily Associations Among Sleep, Stress, and Blood Pressure Across Adulthood. Annals of behavioral medicine: a publication of the Society of Behavioral Medicine, 57(6), 453–462. https://doi.org/10.1093/abm/kaac074
• Bobba-Alves, N., Sturm, G., Lin, J., Ware, S. A., Karan, K. R., Monzel, A. S., Bris, C., Procaccio, V., Lenaers, G., Higgins-Chen, A., Levine, M., Horvath, S., Santhanam, B. S., Kaufman, B. A., Hirano, M., Epel, E., & Picard, M. (2023). Cellular allostatic load is linked to increased energy expenditure and accelerated biological aging. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 155, 106322. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2023.106322

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The Stress Puzzle is hosted by Dr. Ryan L. Brown (https://www.ryanlinnbrown.com/) and supported by the UCSF Stress Measurement Network, an NIH/NIA funded network which aims to better understand the relationship between stress and health by improving the measurement of stress in research studies. Learn more about available resources to support stress research at: www.stressmeasurement.org.

Have burning questions about stress? Email us at stresspuzzlepod@gmail.com and we may feature your question in a future episode!