Melissa Lippold
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC·Psychology
Everyday hassles, such as arguments, demands and worries, add up over time. Strong emotional reactions to these daily stressors predict cardiovascular disease (CVD), one of the leading causes of death in the United States.
- Fields
Psychology
Public Health & Epidemiology
Social Science
- Topics
cardiovascular disease
daily stress
stress reactivity
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2030
What they work on
- Test whether adolescents' daily stressors (how often, how severe, and how upsetting) and parents' reactions to them predict parent cardiometabolic risk and inflammation, both at one time point and over time, in 718 parent–child pairs.
- Identify the psycho-cognitive factors (distress, worry, repetitive negative thinking), social factors (parent–child warmth and conflict, loneliness) and sleep that carry the effect of adolescent stress to parent cardiovascular risk.
- Test whether the crossover effects of adolescent stress on parent health differ by parent socioeconomic status, race and ethnicity, and by the adolescent's biological sex, to identify health disparities.
More about the research
CVD does not affect all groups equally. In midlife, parenting is a central source of daily stress, and stress often rises for both parents and children during adolescence. This project asks whether a teenager's stress can 'cross over' and harm a parent's long-term heart health.
Why it matters
Parents of teenagers could benefit from knowing how their children's daily stress affects their own heart health. By identifying modifiable links, such as worry, sleep, loneliness and parent–child conflict, this work could guide a parenting intervention. Such a program would help parents respond to adolescent stress in ways that lower their cardiovascular risk. It could also reveal socioeconomic, racial, ethnic and sex disparities that such programs need to address.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Portia Miller
University of Pittsburgh, PA·Psychology
Measure family wealth, household assets minus debts, repeatedly across nine observations in 750 families with adolescents aged 13 to 15, to describe how wealth inequality and net worth poverty change over time and differ across socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic groups.
Jude Cassidy
University of Maryland, MD·Psychology
Test whether adding the Circle of Security – Parenting intervention to Early Head Start services reduces insecure attachment, physiological dysregulation and behavior problems, in a randomized trial of 249 parent-child pairs.
Colter Mitchell
University of Michigan, MI·Public Health & Epidemiology
Compare short-term health, economic, social and behavioral outcomes among essential workers, non-essential workers, and people who lost jobs during the 2020 pandemic, using Fragile Families cohort parents and young adults.
The school
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: 72 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 523 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.