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 Aug 2024
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.
Seamon, E., Mattera, Jennifer. A., Keim, Sarah. A., Leerkes, Esther. M., Rennels, Jennifer. L., Kayl, Andrea. J., Kulhanek, Kirsty. M., Narvaez, D., Sanborn, Sarah. M., Grandits, Jennifer. B., Dunkel Schetter, C., Coussons-Read, M., Tarullo, Amanda. R., Schoppe-Sullivan, Sarah. J., Thomason, Moriah. E., Braungart-Rieker, Julie. M., Lumeng, Julie. C., Lenze, Shannon. N., Christian, Lisa. M., … Gartstein, Maria. A. (2024). Leveraging machine learning to study how temperament scores predict pre-term birth status. Global Pediatrics, 100220. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gpeds.2024.100220
Krueger, A. M., Smith, K., Pollock, A., Dunkel Schetter, C., & Mahrer, N. E. (2024). The impact of stress on father involvement in early infancy: Examining risk and protective factors in residential and nonresidential fathers. OBM Integrative and Complementary Medicine, 09(02), 025. https://doi.org/10.21926/obm.icm.2402025
Rinne, G.R., Barclay, M., Somers, J.A., Mahrer, N.E., Shalowitz, M.U., Ramey, S.L., Dunkel Schetter, C., Lee, S.S. (2024). Developmental cascades from maternal preconception stress to child behavior problems: Testing multi-level preconception, prenatal, and postnatal influences. Developmental Psychology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0001728. (Publicly available 2025)
Rinne, G. R., Podosin, M., Mahrer, N. E., Shalowitz, M. U., Ramey, S. L., & Dunkel Schetter, C. (2024). Prospective associations of prenatal stress with child behavior: Moderation by the early childhood caregiving environment. Development and Psychopathology, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0954579424000920
Almeida, I. F., Rinne, G. R., Coussons-Read, M., & Dunkel Schetter, C. (2024). Placental corticotrophin-releasing hormone trajectories in pregnancy: Associations with postpartum depressive symptoms. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 164, 107030. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2024.107030
Thomas, J. L., Somers, J. A., Dunkel Schetter, C., & Sumner, J. A. (2024). Couple-Level manifestations of posttraumatic stress and maternal and paternal postpartum relationship functioning. Depression and Anxiety, 2024(1), 6140465. https://doi.org/10.1155/2024/6140465
Becene, I., Rinne, G. R., Schetter, C. D., & Hollenbach, J. P. (2024). Prenatal stress and hair cortisol in a sample of Latina women. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 164, 107017. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2024.107017
Brown, J. A., Wilson, P. A., & Dunkel Schetter, C. (2023). Sexual socialization experiences and perceived effects on sexual and reproductive health in young African American women. Sex Roles, 90, 82-97. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-023-01435-0