Cumulative Risk and Physiological Stress Responses in African American Adolescents

Objective: To investigate associations between components of cumulative risk (CR) and physiological stress responses in African American adolescents and evaluate emotion regulation as a mediator and sex as a moderator of these associations.

Methods: Cortisol and salivary alpha amylase (sAA) were collected in adolescents ( N = 205; 55% female; 12.1 ± 1.6 years at baseline) as part of a longitudinal study of stress and adjustment in families. CR was assessed at baseline and emotion regulation was assessed at baseline and 2 years later at Wave 3 (W3) using caregiver and adolescent reports. Cortisol and sAA responses to the social competence interview were assessed at W3.

Results: Repeated-measures analyses of variance predicting cortisol and controlling for time of day, adolescent age, medication usage, and pubertal status revealed significant interactions of time with both psychosocial and sociodemographic risk. In both analyses, youths with higher levels of risk showed a steeper decline in cortisol than youths with lower levels of risk. In parallel analyses predicting sAA, time interacted with psychosocial but not with sociodemographic risk. There were no interactions with sex in any of the analyses. Although CR was associated with changes in emotion regulation, there was no evidence that these changes accounted for the observed CR-stress response associations.

Conclusions: These findings illustrate the potential importance of disentangling CR and suggest that additional work is needed to help explicate why and how CR is associated with specific physiological responses to stress.