How Does Family Environment Affect Health Across the Lifespan?

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How Does Family Environment Affect Health Across
the Lifespan?

• Shelley E. Taylor
• University of California, Los Angeles
• May 2008

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A lifespan model of the impact of threat
responses on mental and physical health outcomes
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Developmental origins of responses to threat

• Early environment affects health not only in
  childhood but throughout adulthood into old age,
  controlling for other risk factors
• Childhood SES predicts health outcomes,
  controlling for adult SES
• A harsh early family environment (conflict, cold,
  and/or neglectful, hereafter referred to as
  risky families) predicts adverse health
  outcomes

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Risky Families Questionnaire (Sample Items)

• 1. How often did a parent or other adult in the
  household make you feel that you were loved,
  supported, and cared for?
• 2. How often did a parent or other adult in the
  household swear at you, insult you, put you down,
  or act in a way that made you feel threatened?
• 3. How often did a parent or another adult in the
  household express physical affection for you,
  such as hugging or other physical gesture of
  warmth and affection?

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• Relation of Adverse Childhood Experiences and
  Risk of Major Chronic Diseases
• Health Problem Amount of Abuse
  Adjusted Odds Ratio
• Ischemic
  0
  1.0
• heart disease
  1
  0.9
• 
  2
  0.9
• 
  3
  1.4
• 
  4 or more
  2.2
• 
  Total
  ---
• Any cancer
  0
  1.0
• 
  1
  1.2
• 
  2
  1.2
• 
  3
  1.0
• 
  4 or more
  1.9
• 
  Total
  ---
• Stroke
  0
  1.0
• 
  1
  0.9

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Specific mechanisms

• What are the mechanisms that underlie these
  relations, i.e. by what routes are the effects of
  early environment maintained?
• We focus on
• Alterations in Biological Stress Regulatory
  Systems (Study 1)
• Neural regulation of stress responses (Study 2)

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Study 1Question Does Early Environment Affect
Biological Stress Regulatory Systems?Procedure

• Participants 92 students aged 18-25, prescreened
  for medical and psychological problems
• Participated in laboratory stress task of
  counting backwards as rapidly as possible by 13s
  from 9,095
• Taylor, S.E., Lerner, J.S., Sage, R.M., Lehman,
  B. J., Seeman, T. E. (2004).

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Results

• Harsh early environment is associated with an
  elevated flat trajectory of cortisol responses to
  stress

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Results

• Among males only, very harsh family environment
  is associated with elevated heart rate and blood
  pressure.

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Conclusions

• A harsh early family environment is associated
  with compromised biological responses to threat
  and poorer self-rated health.
• Provides potential mechanism for long term health
  effects of early family environment (allostatic
  load).

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Study 2Family environment and coping

• Children from risky families show
• High levels of avoidant coping
• Overly aggressive responses to stressors
  perceived by others to be only moderately
  challenging
• Ineffective coping (Coping that does not reduce
  experienced stress)
• Question Any neural evidence for these processes?

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Brain candidates for regulation of stress
responses

• Amygdala, tied to threat detection and fear
  responses
• RVLPFC (right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex),
  believed to regulate amygdala responses to threat

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Participants

• 30 healthy, right-handed adults, age 18-36 (12
  men, 18 women)
• Participants responded to 3 tasks in blocked,
  randomized design (Observe Only, Label Emotions,
  Label Gender)

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Observe only
Label emotions
Label gender (Control Task)
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In the observe only task, offspring from harsh
environments show significantly lower amygdala
activity, suggesting they are tuning out the
stimuli
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Results from labeling task

• Amygdala responses of those from harsh families
  significantly higher than those from nurturant
  families
• RVLPFC activity significantly negatively
  correlated with amygdala responses in low RF
  families significantly positively correlated in
  high RF families

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r .66
r -.44
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What do these results mean?

• Offspring from risky families may shut out
  threatening cues with which they do not need to
  engage
• When forced by task demands to engage, amygdala
  response is stronger
• Offspring from risky families do not recruit
  RVLPFC effectively for regulating amygdala
  responses to threatening stimuli

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Conclusions

• Growing up in a risky family environment marked
  by harsh parenting has effects on neural
  processes involved in threat detection and
  regulation of responses to threat
• Offspring from risky families may not have
  effective threat detection and emotion regulation
  skills for coping with stressful circumstances
• Taylor, S. E., Eisenberger, N. I., Saxbe, D.,
  Lehman, B. J., Lieberman, M. D. (2006).
  Biological Psychiatry, 60, 296-301.