Progress 10/01/10 to 09/30/13
Outputs
Target Audience: During the past year I have presented my findings two international conferences. My target audience at these conferences is other child development and family researchers. In addition, I have given talks at community organizations on domestic violence, successful transitions to parenthood, and parenting strategies. The target audiences for these community efforts have been young mothers, and women in abusive relationships. Changes/Problems: May 2013 I resigned my position at Purdue University. July 2013 I began a new asistant professor position at University of California, Davis. This Hatch project was to continue until September 2015, however, I am closing it out two years early because of my move. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided? During the course of the exploration of these topics I have worked with7 different graduate students and over 20 undergraduate students. These students were trained in numerous ways from interacting with participants, biological data collection, biological data preparation, data entry, data analysis, manuscript preparation, and family interaction patterns. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest? Findings have been discussed at two international conferences, various community orgnaizations, four different peer reviewed journals, and one book. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?
Nothing Reported
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
1. Explore the impact of maternal work stress on mother and child behavior and physiology. To this end, I designed and implimented a study of working mothers and their young children. I specifically focused on morning routines and stress on work and non-work. Roughly 60 mother-child dyads participated in this study. These mothers were experiencing relatively high levels of stress, juggling their work and family responsibilties. Those that reported exceptionally high work and family stress had higher hormonal stress levels. This finding was reported in Hibel et al 2012. Further, the children of these mothers also exhibited higher circulating stress hormones and had asynchronous mother-child physiology on maternal work days. These findings were reported in Hibel et al., accepted.Together, these findings also helped infor the book chapter MacDermid-Wadsworth & Hibel, 2013. 2. Explore the impact of marital conflict on mother and child behavior and physiology. To uncover the relations between family conflict, behavior,and physiology, I first conducted a secondary data analysis of exposure to parental violence across the first two years of life. This resulted in a paper (Hibel et al., 2011) finding exposure during infancy to have no effect on stress reactivity, however by the time the children were two those exposed to violence had significantly higher cortisol reactivity to stress. To futher understand these findings, I wrote and was awarded $275,000 from NICHD to examine stress physiology as a mechanism of the spillover from marital conflict to dysrupted parenting to dysregulated child physiology. For this study, 120 mother-father-child triads came into the lab and underwent a 2 hour laboratory assessment resulting in almost 5000 saliva samples and 4000 mins of family interactions. This study just concluded, saliva samples are being assayed and video interactions are being coded. Dissemination of findings will begin within the next 6 months.
Publications
- Type:
Conference Papers and Presentations
Status:
Published
Year Published:
2013
Citation:
Trumbell, J. M., & Hibel, L. C. (2013, April). Maternal Variations in Morning Cortisol: Perceived Stress and Over-reactive Parenting of Pre-school Children. K. Lyons-Ruth (Chair), Maternal and Child Cortisol Levels: Relations to Quality of Caregiving Across the Spectrum of Risk. Symposium conducted at the meeting of the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research on Child Development, Seattle, WA.
- Type:
Conference Papers and Presentations
Status:
Published
Year Published:
2013
Citation:
Trumbell, J. M., Mercado, E., Rubio, D., & Hibel, L. C., (2013, April). Parenting Hyperactive Children: Effects on Parenting Stress and Morning Cortisol in a Sample of Working Mothers. Poster presented at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research on Child Development, Seattle, WA
- Type:
Conference Papers and Presentations
Status:
Published
Year Published:
2013
Citation:
Mercado, E*, Trumbell, J. M*., & Hibel, L. C., (2013, April). Measuring Morning Cortisol in a Sample of Preschool Aged Children: Factors Contributing to Missing Data. Poster presented at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research on Child Development, Seattle, WA.
- Type:
Conference Papers and Presentations
Status:
Published
Year Published:
2013
Citation:
Hibel, L.C., Granger, D. A., Blair, C., Finegood, E. D., & The Family Life Project Investigators (2013, November). Maternal cortisol levels predict their childrens cortisol levels across infancy and toddlerhood. Poster presented at the Annual Meeting of the International Society for Developmental Psychobiology, San Diego, CA.
- Type:
Journal Articles
Status:
Published
Year Published:
2013
Citation:
Hibel, L. C., Senguttavan, U., & Bauer, N. (2013). Do state differences moderate the relationship between depressive symptoms and morning cortisol? Hormones and Behavior, 63, 484-490
- Type:
Journal Articles
Status:
Awaiting Publication
Year Published:
2014
Citation:
Hibel, L. C., Trumbell, J. M. & Mercado, E. (accepted). Work/Non-workday differences in mother, child, and mother-child morning cortisol in a sample of working mothers and their children. Early Human Development
- Type:
Conference Papers and Presentations
Status:
Published
Year Published:
2013
Citation:
Hibel, L. C., & Mercado, E, (2013, April). Morning Cortisol in Pre-school Aged Children: Interactive Contributions of Childcare Provider and Maternal Behavior. C. Blair (Chair), Childrens Experiences Across Early Educational Contexts and Home: Identifying Mechanisms to Support Adrenocortical Functioning. Symposium conducted at the meeting of the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research on Child Development, Seattle, WA.
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Progress 10/01/11 to 09/30/12
Outputs
OUTPUTS: Over the past year we have focused our attention on the marital conflict component of our work. Specifically, we have recruited just over 50 families (mother, father, and child) to participate in a study examining parental stress physiology as a mediator in the link between marital conflict and child self-regulation. This endeavor required the participants to fill out multiple surveys as well as engage in parent-parent and parent-child interactions. In addition we collected salivary samples from the parents and child. A total of 10 undergraduates and 5 graduate students assisted. I presented on the health ramifications of domestic violence to the local YWCA and child-regulation at the Indianapolis Infant and Toddler Specialists conference. We have collected a substantial amount of data on the 50 families and will continue to collect more. PARTICIPANTS: We engaged in a massive training effort of graduate and undergraduate students. These students learned how to collection salivary samples, facilitate participant discussion, encourage mother-child interactions, and prompt participant attachment narratives. In addition to facilitating the participant visits, students have also begun coding the behaviors and scripts from the visits. This required additional training of upwards of 20 hours per person to become competent coders. This project is funded by partner organization NIH, with and R21 (HD066269-01A1) from NICHD. TARGET AUDIENCES: I taught a workshop on stress physiology and child physiological regulation to a class of social workers, pre-school teachers, and other professionals that work with young children. PROJECT MODIFICATIONS: Nothing significant to report during this reporting period.
Impacts
Previous examinations of morning cortisol have largely ignored women, and the role of caregiving. Our study shows mother's morning cortisol to be sensitive in fluctuations in parenting and job stressors. In particular, mothers have higher cortisol levels and steeper morning cortisol responses when they report a combination of high levels of parenting and job stress. This finding has the potential to impact parenting interventions and our understanding of parent behavior. For example, high levels of cortisol have been shown to be related to more over-reactive parenting. Thus, our findings suggest high job stress and high parenting stress may be related to parenting through changes in maternal cortisol.
Publications
- MacDermid-Wadsworth, S., & Hibel, L. C. (2012). Family Systems Theory in Work-Family Research. J. G. Grzywacz & E. Demerouti, (Eds.), New Frontiers in Work and Family Research. Psychology Press & Routledge.
- Hibel, L. C., Trumbell, J. & Mercado, E. M. (November, 2011). The concordance and discordance of mother-child cortisol awakening responses on work and nonwork days. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the International Society for Developmental Psychobiology (Washington, D.C.)
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Progress 10/01/10 to 09/30/11
Outputs
OUTPUTS: I have made substantial strides in beginning my examination of mother child co-regulation of physiology. During this time period I began analyzing the data from working mothers and their 2-4 year old children. My team and I collected data from 56 mother-child dyads. Mothers filled out questionnaires regarding work and family stresses, and child behavior. Mothers and children also collected saliva across 4 consecutive days; 2 nonwork days and 2 work days. Analysis included assaying the 896 salivary samples for cortisol, a hormone associated with the stress response. This endeavor required training 3 graduate students on the collection, organization, and processing of these biological samples. These findings have been presented at two international conferences (one in Canada and one in Washington, DC) and a journal article currently under review. We also began collecting data on marital conflict, and parent and child biobehavioral processes. We have piloted the project with 10 families and are in the process of recruiting more families for the full assessment. As part of this project, romantic couples are prompted to argue and mothers are subsequently asked to interact with their children. We will be investigating the role of stress physiology in the spillover from marital conflict to parenting. PARTICIPANTS: The project examining working mothers and their preschool children has involved multiple individuals. Six undergraduate and 3 graduate students have assisted on the project. In addition, there is also a project manager who holds a bachelors in nursing. The students received course credit for their assistance. One graduate student was paid through an internal assistantship awarded specifically for this project. This assistantship is for two full years of funding. The Project coordinator was paid through my departmental start up funds. She has worked on the project for approximately three person months per year. The students have gain unique knowledge in biosocial examination and expertise in the incorporation of biological markers into studies of behavior. Further, multiple students helped create the posters presented at the international conferences and two of the graduate students have assisted in the writing of a manuscript that was just submitted. These same individuals are also assisting on the marital conflict project. Given this project is just starting up, most of the time spent by the team has been on the working mother project. Dr German Posada of Purdue University, is a collaborator the marital conflict project, along with consultants Drs Gayla Margolin and Douglas Granger. Dr Posada has assisted in the design and implementation of the study. Drs Margolin and Granger assisted in the project's initial design. TARGET AUDIENCES: The projected examining working mothers has the potential assist in the creation of policy and interventions. Our findings highlight the psychological and physiological strains a working mother is under. These stress could, in part, be ameliorated with more family friendly work policies. For example, flexible working schedules and stress management techniques could be offered in the work place. Further, interventions assisting mother's successful navigation of work and family strains could be implemented. In particular, mother and fathers could be taught more successful ways to handle child problem behavior and educated in ways to minimize the cross over of stress from family to work, and work to family. PROJECT MODIFICATIONS: The working mother project was initially designed to not only capture the psychological and physiological stress of working mothers and their children, but in particular, examine the effect of shift-work. Unfortunately, we were unable to recruit enough mothers that work the night shift to run any meaningful analyses. I am still very interested in this question and hope to secure more funds to adequately address this issue. However, for the time being I have had to focus my analyses on mothers working typical shifts.
Impacts
Analyses of the working mother and preschool child data revealed both mothers and children have higher cortisol awakening responses on work days compared to non-work days. Mothers reporting stressful or dysfunctional parent-child relationships have the highest cortisol levels and awakening responses. This was found to be particularly true on non-work days when mothers are home with their kids. Further, mothers and children have correlated cortisol awakening responses, but only on non-work days. However, mothers reporting stressful or dysfunctional relationships with their child do not have correlated awakening responses with their kids on either work or non work days. While these findings in this content area are new, our study is also one of the first to systematically examine morning cortisol in young children. Therefore we are also are examining the potential problems and successes for collecting in this young population.
Publications
- Hibel, L. C., Mercado, E. M., & Trumbell, J. (2012, pending, under review). Parenting stressors and morning cortisol in a sample of working mothers. Journal of Family Psychology.
- Hibel, L. C., Trumbell, J. & Mercado, E. M. (November, 2011). The concodrdance and discordance of mother-child cortisol awakening responses on work and nonwork days. To be presented at the Annual Meeting of the International Society for Developmental Psychobiology (Washington, D.C.)
- Senguttuvan, U., Mercado, E, Trumbell, J. M., & Hibel, L.C. (April, 2011). Effect of Work Stress on Parenting: Is Maternal Stress Physiology a Key Mechanism Presented at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research on Child Development (Montreal, Canada)
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