Psychology Theses and Dissertations

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https://hdl.handle.net/1794/995

This collection contains some of the theses and dissertations produced by students in the University of Oregon Psychology Graduate Program. Paper copies of these and other dissertations and theses are available through the UO Libraries.

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Browsing Psychology Theses and Dissertations by Subject "Adolescent"

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    Parenting and Adolescent Health: Mechanisms of Stress-Disease Comorbidity
    (University of Oregon, 2020-09-24) Nelson, Benjamin; Allen, Nicholas
    Adolescence is partly characterized by alterations in affective functioning during which individuals are at increased risk for the onset of mental health disorders. The experience of stress during adolescence has the potential to influence health trajectories across the lifespan as comorbidity between mental health and physical disease processes start to unfold during this period. Importantly, close relationships, such as those between adolescents and their parents, have the potential to influence and moderate (i.e., buffer or exacerbate) the expression of psychopathology and associated disease processes to influence these health trajectories. In this dissertation, I present three multimethod studies integrating clinical diagnoses, parent-adolescent interactions, self-reported affect, observed behavior, psychophysiology, inflammation, and cellular aging to better elucidate the role parent-adolescent relationships play in influencing adolescent mental and physical health trajectories. In Chapter I, the introduction elucidates the association between parent-adolescent relationships with both adolescent mental and physical health by presenting a biological cascade model from stress to disease. Chapter II presents the first study, which examines how context, specifically varying emotionally charged interactions with parents, influence the expression of adolescent depression at the level of self-report, behavior, and psychophysiology. Chapter III presents the second study, which utilizes a multi-system approach to investigate the effect of observed parental behavior on the relationship between sympathetic physiology and inflammation in adolescents. Chapter IV presents the third study, elucidating that association between maternal depression and measures of basal stress and social stress reactivity across measures of affect, cardiovascular functioning, and biological aging in their adolescent children. Lastly, Chapter V provides a brief overview of each study and discusses theoretical implications of findings. In addition, the discussion presents future directions that focus on how smartphone, wearable, and smart home devices can provide an opportunity to advance psychological science by providing a passive sensing ecosystem in order to bring the laboratory out into real world environments in order to improve ecological validity, while simultaneously allowing for the advent of a novel precision psychology approaches to prevention and intervention in order to improve healthcare outcomes and better understand how relationships impact health across the lifespan.