Relationships and Stress Lab

The Developmental Timing of Trauma Exposure or DevTiming Study is a related line of research members of the Relationships and Stress lab have begun working to explicate descriptive aspects of trauma exposure that uniquely impact later maladaptive relational behaviors as a means of developing more specific models of the mechanisms through which trauma exposure leads to maladaptive relational behaviors. Based in pre-clinical models of stress and aggression as well as biological models of the PTSD sex disparity, we focus on the developmental timing of trauma exposure. In particular, we are testing whether trauma exposure during puberty uniquely affects the emergence of aggressive behavior, social anxiety, biased threat perception, interpersonal dependency, and other maladaptive behaviors in future relationships. We also consider sex differences in these relations. We are currently testing these questions using existing large-scale datasets and a collection of young adults’ retrospective reports of the developmental timing of their trauma exposure. With a greater empirical foundation data, we plan to pursue these questions further in future prospective data collection efforts.