Our Research Mission:

The overall mission of the Mechanisms of Emotion, Stress, and Health (MESH) lab at Penn State University is to better understand the associations between psychological stress and stress responses with physical health and well-being, with an emphasis on older and midlife adults (but other populations as well).

A major emphasis is the role of emotion and related processes in the connection between stress and health, including

• affective tendencies related to negative and positive affect
• emotional expression
• emotion regulation, including emotional suppression
• loneliness
• rumination
• meaning-making (making meaning from stressful experiences)

We view affective processes as proximal indicators of stress that encapsulate the appraisal process and as key phenomena that explain or extend links between stress and health in daily life. Emotional processes that are often related to social relationships are of key interest. For example, we are interested in the degree to which the acknowledgement of and expression of negative mood (anger, sadness, fear) may have positive downstream consequences for health and well-being, perhaps particularly in the context of chronic disease where individuals may be motivated to suppress emotion (e.g., chronic pain).

Drawing on the fields of psychoneuroimmunology (PNI) and health psychology, we study how stress and emotion are linked with numerous health-related outcomes, including

• Measures of inflammation (e.g., inflammatory cytokines, CRP)
• Physical pain
• CVD risk
• Cognitive performance and cognitive aging
• Self-reported health and well-being.

We also study individual differences in how such phenomena are linked and use complex models that integrate behavior and social/demographic factors. In such models we often test mechanistic pathways. We also ask questions about for whom and under what circumstances issues related to stress and emotional responses are relevant to health. In terms of individual differences we often focus on gender and age but also look at other factors, such as socioeconomic status (SES), race/ethnicity, and other demographic factors related to health and health disparities. Sleep quality is a key behavior often included in our models.

Students and postdocs in this laboratory gain broad training in PNI and biobehavioral health research, experience working with patients and members of the community, and extensive training in research methods and statistics. Interests of recent graduate students and postdoctoral scholars in the lab have included: the role of positive emotion and resilience; emotion variability; healthy aging; personality; loneliness; sexual health disparities linked with stress; the impact of discrimination; social relationships; prospective memory; and methodological approaches needed to study such phenomena in daily life (including ecological momentary assessment).