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 with a team science approach involving collaborators across disciplines (psychiatry, obstetrics, public health, nursing, sociology, anthropology, and of course psychology).
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 is not currently accepting graduate students or research assistants. We welcome collaborators in research involving any of our datasets and works.
Latest Publications:
Somers, J. A., Rinne, G. R., Barclay, M. E., Dunkel Schetter, C., & Lee, S. S. (2025). Affect synchrony and emotion coregulation are separable processes: Evaluation of relational stress and mother–infant synchrony. Journal of Family Psychology, 39(4), 454–464. https://doi.org/10.1037/fam0001310
Mahrer, N. E., Rinne, G. R., Guardino, C. M., Swales, D. A., Shalowitz, M., Ramey, S. L., & Dunkel Schetter, C. (2025). Parenting behavior and early childhood mental health: Testing cortisol awakening response as a moderator of child internalizing and externalizing. OBM integrative and complimentary medicine, 10, 011. https://doi.org/10.21926/obm.icm.2501011 PMID: 40321845 PMCID: PMC12046604
Kane, H. S., Brown, J. A., Nelson, J. A., Cha, L., Dunkel Schetter, C., & Robles, T. F. (2025). Social relationships and cardiometabolic risk in low-income mothers following birth. Health Psychology, 44(5), 426–435. https://doi.org/10.1037/hea0001422
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 PMID: 39700651 PMCID: PMC11750603
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 PMID: 39806564 PMCID: PMC11779552
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 PMID: 39631238