Date of Award

Fall 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Gee, Dylan

Abstract

Decades of research inform our understanding of the pernicious effects of exposure to stress for individuals across the lifespan. This research underscores that exposure to stressful contexts places individuals at increased risk for developing cognitive, social, emotional, and physical health problems. However, exposure to stress does not have a universal effect on all individuals across development, likely due in part to the extreme heterogeneity in experiential, environmental, and temporal aspects of stress. Recent advances in the study of the psychobiological effects of stress have focused on better understanding how heterogeneity in exposure may account for heterogeneity in developmental and clinical trajectories following exposure, harnessing dimensional models of stress exposure to increase understanding of the etiology of stress-related psychopathology. The studies in the present dissertation are grounded in a novel theoretical model—detailed in the introductory chapter—that proposes developmentally specific impacts of exposure to isolated dimensions of stress. In Chapter 2, I present information on the development and initial validation of a novel clinical tool for the systematic assessment of individuals’ exposure to specific features of stress exposure from infancy to early adulthood that yields granular data necessary to explore isolated and interactive effects of exposure to specific features of stress. In Chapter 3, I present an empirical study—utilizing data generated by this novel clinical instrument—examining whether individuals’ perceptions of the controllability and predictability of stress moderates the association between exposure to stress across the life course and trauma-related symptomatology assessed in adulthood, and whether this moderation effect varies as a function of the developmental period during which stress exposure occurred. In Chapter 4, I present an empirical study investigating the role of caregiver involvement in a stressor in the context of familial exposure to COVID-related stress in the spring of 2020, and isolate specific caregiving behaviors that may buffer, or conversely exacerbate, the impact of stress exposure on youth mental health. I end with a general discussion of both the potential and limitations of utilizing a dimensional approach to parsing heterogeneity in outcomes following exposure to stress and highlight implications of the present studies for the development of novel prevention and intervention efforts for youth exposed to stress. Through this dissertation, I highlight that increasingly detailed understanding of the multilevel dimensions that impact development has the potential to directly inform critical advances in the field’s conceptualization of the etiological processes underlying the development of psychopathology.

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