Frontiers in Stress Science:

Understanding Stress Biology, Behavior, and Resilience in Adolescence

On May 8, 2026, we hosted the second SMN webinar, “Frontiers in Stress Science: Understanding Stress Biology, Behavior, and Resilience in Adolescence.” The webinar explored how stress shapes adolescent health, well-being, and development, including how stress becomes biologically embedded, influences developmental trajectories and aging, and how resilience can be promoted. The event featured three leading researchers and four emerging scholars whose work spans childhood adversity, social relationships, stress biology, and the neurodevelopment of stress and emotion regulation.

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Opening:

Dr. George Slavich from SMN and Dr. Emily Hooker from the National Institute on Aging

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Keynote Talks:

• Dr. Dylan G. Gee – The adolescent brain in context: Environmental Pathways to Risk and Resilience [Slides] [Paper]

 

Adolescence is a dynamic period when stress exposure can have particularly strong effects on the developing brain and mental health. Yet there is substantial variability across individuals in both exposures and outcomes. Understanding this variability is important for delineating mechanisms of risk and resilience. In this talk, I present research that examines variability and integrates across multiple levels of analysis to elucidate how environmental contexts relate to brain development and mental health in adolescence.

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• Dr. Katie B. Ehrlich – Adolescent stress and health: Linking social experiences to biology and behavior [Slides]

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Adolescence is a critical window for understanding how stress shapes biology and behavior across development. In this talk, I will describe recent work that demonstrates how experiences of social adversity, including discrimination, socioeconomic disadvantage, and maltreatment, are associated with adolescents’ health-relevant behaviors (e.g., eating patterns) and biological processes such as inflammation and immune function. I will present evidence for “skin-deep” resilience, in which outward indicators of competence may co-occur with elevated physiological risk, as well as findings on how cumulative and developmentally timed stress exposures become biologically embedded during childhood and adolescence. The talk will emphasize how integrating behavioral and biological perspectives can deepen our understanding of both vulnerability and resilience during adolescence, with implications for identifying targets for early intervention.

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• Dr. Katie A. McLaughlin – Dimensions of adversity and neurodevelopmental mechanisms linking childhood adversity with psychopathology [Slides]

 

Children who have experienced environmental adversity—such as abuse, neglect, or poverty—are at markedly elevated risk for developing psychopathology. Understanding how adverse early experiences exert such a profound influence on children’s mental health is critical for developing better early intervention strategies. Yet, much existing research relies on a cumulative risk approach that is unlikely to reveal these mechanisms. This approach tallies the number of distinct adversities experienced to create a risk score. This risk score fails to distinguish between distinct types of environmental experience, implicitly assuming that very different experiences influence development through the same underlying mechanisms. In this talk, I advance an alternative approach that conceptualizes adversity along distinct dimensions, emphasizes the central role of learning mechanisms and the neural circuitry that supports these mechanisms, and distinguishes between different forms of adversity that might influence learning and neural development in distinct ways.  A key advantage of this approach is that learning mechanisms provide clear targets for interventions aimed at preventing psychopathology in children who have experienced adversity.

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Data Blitz:

• Ellie Antici – Salivary inflammatory reactivity to acute psychosocial stress in adolescents: Concordance with plasma and links to depression [Slides] [Paper]

• Dr. Karen Smith – Early life stress increases adolescents' expectation of volatility when learning [Slides]

• Cleanthis Michael – Childhood adversity and delayed brain maturation: Disentangling environmental and genetic influences [Slides]

• Sally Hang – Methodological innovations for stress detection using machine learning and wearable devices [Slides] [Pre-print]