Humans exhibit resilience every day, said Colorado State University Associate Professor Kimberly French, who researches and explores the relationships between stress and relationships among family members. In her most recent study, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, French collaborated with researchers across the United States to examine how compounding stress transfers between parents and adolescents, along with how it impacts their health in the overtime.
“I am really inspired by research and theory that accounts for time since time is so important,” French said.
The study integrates the element of time by examining stress build-up through the allostatic load model, which is a theoretical model that examines how stress build-up over time impacts both physical and mental health.
Three types of strain were examined: daily cortisol slope, physical symptoms and sleep, according to the paper. The study builds on data from a Work, Family & Health Network study, in which 131 parent-child pairings were interviewed nightly to assess their daily experiences. Participants also sent in saliva collections from multiple days to calculate cortisol slope over a given day.
French’s collaborator, Zheng Chen, an associate professor at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg originally discussed the idea for the study with French. Chen then shared that Pennsylvania State University professor and collaborator on the paper, Soomi Lee, had previously worked with the data.
In addition to French, Chen and Lee, Assistant Professor Claire Smith from the University of South Florida also contributed to the project, with the collaboration happening virtually over the course of the study’s seven-year tenure.
Smith noted that the interinstitutional and interdisciplinary collaboration among the team made the discussions of topics that much richer.
“Communicating over email and video conferencing did not, in my experience, make a significant difference for the quality of the collaboration,” Smith said. “My co-authors are energetic, intelligent, creative and kind. Even seeing them over (Microsoft) Teams left me feeling inspired and excited to continue the project.”
The paper has 24 total hypotheses, which effectively caused the team to have to utilize multiple strategies to analyze and answer their research question and represent the data in numerical ways.
“It was like, ‘What does that accumulation mean, and how do we represent it as a number?’… It was just a lot of complicated questions,” French said. “All papers do it in different ways, and there’s not really a clear, certain conceptual guide.”
Out of the 24 hypotheses tested, only one was “really supported,” French said.
“This project reaffirmed that meaningful research is a marathon, not a sprint. The combination of persistence, co-authors’ expertise and willingness to reframe ideas in response to critique ultimately made the paper far stronger than our initial idea. We now have a different project coming out of this project.” –Zheng Chen, University of South Florida St. Petersburg Associate Professor
The supported hypothesis provides evidence that adolescents who experienced a cumulative stress pile-up had adverse health outcomes.
“Our main analysis finds relatively weak support for the idea that pile-up across days is linearly associated with increased daily strain within and across parents and adolescents,” the study reads.
French previously elaborated on the group’s findings to CSU SOURCE.
“As parents’ stressors piled up, their teenagers reported fewer sleep hours and vice versa,” French told SOURCE. “As the stress continues to pile up, we see the opposite trend — that more stress is correlated with longer sleep. … Once people get to extreme stress levels, they take preventative action — like seeking more sleep to recover.”
Beyond the results of the paper, the study also offers practical, real-world practices that can help reduce the impacts of stress. French said the study points to a greater need for work-life balance to ensure people have healthier family dynamics.
French also pointed to better societal structures to ensure that work doesn’t spill into family life and that society has resources to support families on a regular basis. The findings also encourage individuals to find strategies, such as mindfulness, in order to cope with stress.
Lee elaborated on the findings and noted ways future research may apply them.
“This is one of the first studies to demonstrate how stressor pile-up can cross over between parents and their adolescent children,” Lee said. “Moving forward, future research could explore the specific mechanisms driving this crossover and identify the circumstances under which it becomes more pronounced.”
The review process of the paper was difficult and lengthy, French and Chen said. Chen added that the group felt despair at times when given challenging critiques from reviewers who saw the topic through a different lens.
“This project reaffirmed that meaningful research is a marathon, not a sprint,” Chen said. “The combination of persistence, co-authors’ expertise and willingness to reframe ideas in response to critique ultimately made the paper far stronger than our initial idea. We now have a different project coming out of this project.”
Reach Chloe Rios at science@collegian.com or on social media @rmcollegian.