In the Stress Processes in Pregnancy Lab, Prof. Dunkel Schetter and her students and collaborators conduct research on biopsychosocial processes in pregnancy. A primary focus is on prenatal maternal stress conceptualized as environmental exposures (acute events and chronic conditions), emotional responses (anxiety and depression), and appraisals (perceived stress) and testing the effects on maternal outcomes including preterm birth, postpartum depression and offspring outcomes in infancy and early childhood. Preterm birth and postpartum depression are high incidence in the U.S. and globally, and pose many risks to the physical and mental health of individuals and families. The program of work further focuses on psychological and biological mechanisms and broad risk and psychosocial resilience factors.
Our work involves prospective longitudinal studies of thousands of pregnant women of diverse race and ethnicity and socioeconomic status including studies of low-income populations and Latin American and African American women interviewed in person in English or Spanish. The importance of race/ethnicity in our work has led to programmatic research on racial stressors such as racism and discrimination and cultural resources such as familism to fully understand the biopsychosocial processes involved. A long-standing emphasis on social and personality processes includes studies on social support, relationship quality, and other concepts such as self-esteem, mastery and dispositional optimism.
Our work has documented that prenatal anxiety, defined as anxiety about a current pregnancy, reliably predicts length of gestation and that HPA mechanisms especially corticotropin-releasing hormone of placental origin (pCRH) are involved in the pathways linking pregnancy anxiety to earlier birth. The lab has also studied maternal and offspring cortisol with blood, saliva and hair samples and examined immune mechanisms, among others. This program of work has implications for preventive interventions and translational work has been undertaken.
For the past decade, Prof. Dunkel Schetter has been engaged in work with the NICHD-funded Community Child Health Network (CCHN) that conducted a community collaborative study on SES and racial/ethnic disparities in maternal and child health in low and middle income areas in five US sites. CCHN recruited 2500 African American, Hispanic and non-Hispanic White mothers and a subset of their partners. This work has yielded many papers on a wide range of topics including work on fathers and couples (See Projects for a full list)
An R01 follow-up study of a portion of the CCHN cohort led by Prof. Dunkel Schetter (PI) studied children of a subsequent birth and their mothers in their homes permitting examination of preconception (interconception) and prenatal processes in the prediction of maternal, birth and early child outcomes (see Publications). That work along with another recent R01 funded cohort study (Healthy Babies Before Birth/HB3) based in Los Angeles and Denver includes extensive measures of biomarkers of neuroendocrine, immune, metabolic, epigenetic, and gene expression processes in maternal and child outcomes. (See Projects)
The lab welcomes collaborators in research involving any of our datasets and works with a team science approach involving collaborators across disciplines (psychiatry, obstetrics, public health, nursing, sociology, anthropology, and of course psychology).
Latest Publications:
Pubs List Dunkel Schetter Mar 2025
Mahrer, N. E., Rinne, G. R., Guardino, C. M., Swales, D. A., Shalowitz, M., Ramey, S. L., & Dunkel Schetter, C. (In press). Parenting behavior and early childhood mental health: Testing cortisol awakening response as a moderator of child internalizing and externalizing. OBM Integrative and Complementary Medicine.
Kane, H. S., Brown, J. A., Nelson, J. A., Cha, L., Dunkel Schetter, C., & Robles, T. F. (In press). Social relationships and cardiometabolic risk in low-income mothers following birth. Health Psychology.
Cha, L., Dunkel Schetter, C., & Sumner, J. A. (2025). Neighborhood disorder and social cohesion: Links to maternal cardiometabolic risk one year postpartum. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 189, Article 112012. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpsychores.2024.112012
Kofman, Y. B., Brown, J. A., Dunkel Schetter, C., & Sumner, J. A. (2025). Trauma exposure, contextual stressors, and PTSD symptoms: Patterns in racially and ethnically diverse, low-income postpartum women. Psychological Medicine, 54(16), 4747–4758. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291724002915
Okun, M. L., Segerstrom, S., Jackman, S., Ross, K., Dunkel Schetter, C., & Coussons-Read, M. (2025). Variability in perinatal sleep quality is associated with an atypical cortisol awakening response and increased mood symptoms. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 172, Article 107248. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2024.107248
Rinne, G.R., Guardino, C.M., Soriano, M., & Dunkel Schetter, C. (2024). Chronic stress and hair cortisol concentration in mothers: A two-study investigation. Stress and Health, e3493. https://doi.org/10.1002/smi.3493
Premji, S. S., Lalani, S., Ghani, F., Nausheen, S., Forcheh, N., Omuse, G., Letourneau, N., Babar, N., Sulaiman, S., Wangira, M., Ali, S. S., Islam, N., Dosani, A., Yim, I. S., & on behalf of Maternal-infant Global Health Team (CDS member of Team). (2024). Allostatic load as a mediator and perceived chronic stress as a moderator in the association between maternal mental health and preterm birth: A prospective cohort study of pregnant women in Pakistan. Psychopathology, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1159/000540579 PMID: 33945579 PMCID: PMC8096039
Brown, J. A., Robles, T. F., Labao, J., Soriano, M., & Dunkel Schetter, C. (2024). Microaggressions among staff in higher education: Examining differences by social identities, and the association with job satisfaction. Journal of Workplace Behavioral Health, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/15555240.2024.2406491