Who We Are

Personal Statement

My work focuses on relationships between stress and health in high risk groups: spouse caregivers of persons with Alzheimer’s disease, medical students, psychiatric/medical outpatients/inpatients, air traffic controllers, and camp counselors. We have developed and/or revised measures of medical student stress, caregiver burden, patient anger/dyscontrol, process coping, appraisal, neuropsychological function and physician awareness of patient problems. These measures have been used by university researchers, insurance/pharmaceutical companies in clinical trials, prisons, nursing homes/long term care, rehabilitation facilities, and public health organizations. These measures have been shown to predict and be predicted by physiological and cognitive measures. We have also focused on moderators of such relationships (e.g., gender, personality, and co-morbidities). We have used multicohort long-term studies that allow the study of interactions between exposures to stressors, hard-wired vulnerabilities, and more temporal resources. Our long-range goal has been to better understand the mechanisms by which chronic stress translates into physical, mental, or cognitive problems. Such relationships could guide interventions for groups at high risk for negative outcomes. We have examined caregivers of spouses with AD and demographically similar spouse non-caregivers, both cross-sectionally and longitudinally. We have assessed the degree to which depression, stress hormones, inflammation, and insulin resistance in caregivers predict cognitive decline in caregivers relative to non-caregivers. We are attempting to replicate our earlier work that showed that chronic stress and chronic disease moderate each other’s physiological risks, such as dysregulation specific to each disease (e.g., metabolic syndrome with CHD, blood pressure reactivity with hypertension, and immune function with cancer history). These outcomes are exacerbated in caregivers with a chronic disease relative to non-caregivers with a chronic disease, but not in caregivers and non-caregivers without a chronic disease.

Education

Post-Doctoral Fellow, Epidemiology & Biostatistics, University of Washington, Seattle, 1976-1978
Post-Doctoral Fellow, Statistics, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida, 1976
Ph.D., Psychology, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York, 1975
M.S. Psychology, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York, 1972
B.A., Psychology/Mathematics, City University of New York, Queens College, Flushing, New York, 1969

Department Affiliations