Early Life Stress Moderates the Link Between HPG Hormones and Daily Adolescent Stress and Affect

• In Event: Stress and Adversity in Adolescents: The Roles of Stress Physiology

Abstract

How does Early Life Stress (ELS) impact associations between daily hormone levels and adolescent experiences of stress and affect? This study sought to improve our understanding of these relationship by measuring daily pubertal hormones and daily adolescent experiences of stress coping and affective states, and by examining how ELS might impact these relationships. We used a factor model of 7 hormones from the HPA and HPG axes (n = 994 participants, 8084 samples) using data from a field study (https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/web/ICPSR/studies/38180) collected over ten consecutive weekdays in a representative sample of teens starting high school. We then fit a Bayesian model to our large dataset to explore how hormone activity was related to outcomes that have been demonstrated to be linked to mental health and wellbeing (self-reports of daily affect and stress coping) and explored how exposure to ELS (measured using the Risky Families Questionnaire) might impact these daily hormone-experience relationships.
Results in females and males, HPG activity was broadly associated with improved stress coping and more negative, relative to positive, affective states. Additionally, in both females and males, exposure to early life stress was broadly associated with worse stress coping and more negative, relative to positive, affective states. Interestingly, in males, high early life stress appeared to suppress the positive association between HPG activity and both stress coping and affect, but only when HPA activity was high. This pattern was also present in plots showing the link between hormones and stress coping in females exposed to early life stress, but was non-significant.
Findings from this study suggested an overall protective effect of HPG system activity in females and males, and an overall positive relationship between HPG activity and outcomes in females. In males, moderation of the relationship between HPG activity and outcomes was observed such that HPG activity was positively associated with outcomes except when HPA activity was high and ELS was also high. Under these conditions in males, HPA activity appeared to suppress the positive association between HPG activity and outcomes. These findings suggest that HPA and HPG activity, as well as past and current exposure to stressors, are important variables to account for when seeking to relate hormone concentrations to current experiences in adolescent populations. These findings suggest that field research, when it is combined with powerful statistical techniques, may help to improve our understanding of how ELS impacts the relationship between adolescent hormones and daily measures of well-being.

Authors

• Julia E Chafkin, University of Texas at Austin
  Presenting Author

• Robert Alan Josephs, University of Texas at Austin

• Joseph O'Brien, University of Texas at Austin

• Fortunato Nicholas Medrano, University of Texas at Austin

• Hae Yeon Lee, National University of Singapore

• David Scott Yeager, University of Texas at Austin