HEALTH Research Institute

Dr. Daphne C. Hernandez is an Associate Professor in the Department of Health & Human Performance, pilot project Principal Investigator in the UHAND program, and a HEALTH Research Institute mentee. She recently received funding from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to study the impact of stress within the family environment of U.S.-born adolescents residing with immigrant parents. There are 3.2 million U.S.-born children of immigrant Latinos, one of the largest and fastest growing segments of the U.S. child population. A number of these children reside in mixed-status families (at least one parent is unauthorized to work or reside in the U.S.). Aside from daily stressors, U.S.-born children in mixed-status families also experience culturally-based stressors, such as deportation policies and anti-immigrant sentiment. The constant awareness of the potential to have one or both parents deported places these children at elevated risk for experiencing poor mental and behavioral health outcomes like anxiety, depression, and substance use. Over time, these individual-level stressors create a perfect storm of chronic stress that has detrimental health effects that fuel disparities. Chronic stress can lead to either hypo- or hyper-arousal, which alters the “set point” for stress regulation. Further, parents and children jointly influence each other’s physiological responses. The synchrony of cortisol patterns between adolescents and their parents offer insight into family-level stressors that may contribute to adolescent mental and behavioral health vulnerabilities. The goal of this study is to measure the synchrony of parent and adolescent cortisol production (i.e. cortisol synchrony). Through strong community-based collaborations, this study will advance the scientific knowledge of the impact of stress within the Latino family environment. This comprehensive view of family functioning can then be used to inform interventions. This work is in collaboration with Dr. Ezemenari M. Obasi, Dr. Tzu-An Chen, Dr. Douglas Granger (University of California-Irvine), and Dr. Joseph Grzywacz (Florida State University).