George Slavich

University of California, Los Angeles | UCLA · Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioural Sciences

Purpose: The purpose of the current study, The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Study of Health in Early and Adult Life (SHINE), was to build on the landmark Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (SECCYD), a longitudinal birth cohort initiated in 1991, by conducting a health-focused follow-up of the now ad...

Objective Whether psychosocial adversity during pregnancy impacts fetal health outcomes at birth remains underexplored. This is a critical issue given significant social disadvantage and psychosocial stress faced by pregnant women worldwide. Study design Measures of social disadvantage and psychological factors, and medical/reproductive and nutrit...

Health research and health care alike are presently based on infrequent assessments that provide an incomplete picture of clinical functioning. Consequently, opportunities to identify and prevent health events before they occur are missed. New health technologies are addressing these critical issues by enabling the continual monitoring of health-re...

Adolescents' suicidal behavior frequently is preceded by interpersonal stress, but not all who experience distress attempt to end their lives. Recent theories have posited individual differences in stress-related inflammatory reactivity may be associated with psychopathology risk; this study examined inflammatory reactivity as a moderator of the pr...

Psychoneuroimmunology and immunopsychiatry are quickly approaching a critical point where the clinical translatability of our promising evidence base will be tested. To maximize our chances for translational success, we believe researchers must adopt causal inference techniques that augment the causal relevance of estimates given theorized causal s...

Eating behaviors in response to acute stressors are highly variable: whereas many individuals eat more following stressors, others eat less or show no change in food consumption. Understanding factors that predict individual differences in eating behaviors may help elucidate the psychosocial mechanisms underlying obesity, yet few experimental studi...

The exciting field of human social genomics provides an evolutionarily informed, multilevel framework for understanding how positive and negative social–environmental experiences affect the genome to impact lifelong health, well‐being, behavior, and longevity. In this review, we first summarize common patterns of socially influenced changes in the...

Classic theories of stress and health are largely based on assumptions regarding how different psychosocial stressors influence biological processes that in turn affect human health and behavior. Although theoretically rich, this work has yielded little consensus and led to numerous conceptual, measurement, and reproducibility issues. Social Safety...

Objective : Although life stress and adversity have emerged as risk factors for mental health problems and cognitive impairment among older adults, prior studies on this topic have been cross-sectional and based on relatively homogeneous samples. To address these issues, we examined prospective associations between lifetime adversity and symptoms o...

Atypically elevated inflammation is a transdiagnostic risk factor for a number of psychiatric (e.g., depression, psychosis) and somatic conditions (e.g., ulcerative colitis, osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis). Inflammation can be influenced by a variety of psychosocial processes, such as emotion regulation. Characterization of which emotion regu...

Although greater lifetime stressor exposure has been associated with physical and mental health issues in the general population, relatively little is known about how lifetime stressors impact the physical and mental health of elite athletes or the factors moderating this association. Given that many elite athletes show signs of perfectionism, and...

Background: Although maternal stressor exposure has been associated with shorter telomere length (TL) in offspring, this literature is based largely on White samples. Furthermore, timing of maternal stressors has rarely been examined. Here, we examined how maternal stressors occurring during adolescence, pregnancy, and across the lifespan related...

Background: Research has shown that sexual minority people of color experience pervasive and sometimes severe life stressors that increase their risk of experiencing mental health problems, and that can contribute to lifelong health disparities. However, no studies in this population have investigated stressor exposure occurring over the entire li...

This study addressed whether lifetime stressor exposure was associated with psychophysiological reactivity and habituation to a novel laboratory-based stressor. Eighty-six participants ( M age = 23.31 years, SD = 4.94) reported their exposure to lifetime non-sport and sport-specific stressors before completing two consecutive trials of the Trier So...

Although race/ethnicity is associated with substantial differences in risk for depression and other diseases of aging in the United States, the processes underlying these health disparities remain poorly understood. We addressed this issue by examining how levels of a robust marker of inflammatory activity, C-reactive protein (CRP), and depression...

The motivation to socially connect with peers increases during adolescence in parallel with changes in neurodevelopment. These changes in social motivation create opportunities for experiences that can impact risk for psychopathology, but the specific motivational presentations that confer greater psychopathology risk are not fully understood. To a...

Background: Biobehavioral factors such as social isolation and depression have been associated with disease progression in ovarian and other cancers. Here, the authors developed a noninvasive, exosomal RNA profile for predicting ovarian cancer disease progression and subsequently tested whether it increased in association with biobehavioral risk f...

Background: Psychosocial stressors characterized by social threat, such as interpersonal loss and social rejection, are associated with depression in adolescents. Few studies, however, have examined whether social threat affects fronto-cingulate-limbic systems implicated in adolescent depression. Methods: We assessed lifetime stressor severity a...

Poster presented at the annual International Society for Psychoneuroendocrinology conference in Chicago, IL.

Presentation discussing how applied and methodological research in biological psychiatry should be mutually-informing, with a narrative focus on the inflammatory phenotyping of depression. Two papers are reviewed: 1) a paper (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-021-01414-5) demonstrating that the presence of a biological phenotype of a disorder...

Background Although corporal punishment is a common form of punishment with known negative impacts on health and behavior, how such punishment affects neurocognitive systems is relatively unknown. Method To address this issue, we examined how corporal punishment affects neural measures of error and reward processing in 149 adolescent boys and girl...

Objective Whether psychosocial adversity during pregnancy impacts fetal health outcomes at birth remains underexplored. This is a critical issue given significant social disadvantage and psychosocial stress faced by pregnant women worldwide. Study Design Measures of social disadvantage and psychological factors, and medical/reproductive and nutriti...

Background: Although characterizing associations between inflammation and depression may prove critical for informing theory, research, and treatment decisions, extant research has been limited by ignoring the possibility that inflammation may be simultaneously associated with depression broadly and with a subset of symptoms. This lack of direct co...

Objective: Despite considerable research documenting how stress affects brain and neurobehavioral outcomes, few studies have assessed stressor exposure occurring over the entire lifespan and no studies have investigated these associations in people living with HIV (PLWH), despite the high stress and disease burden experienced by this population. T...

Background Although characterizing associations between inflammation and depression may prove critical for informing theory, research, and treatment decisions, extant research has been limited by ignoring the possibility that inflammation may be simultaneously associated with depression broadly and with a subset of symptoms. This lack of direct com...

Objective: Adolescent girls who grow up with mothers who are depressed are themselves highly vulnerable to developing depression (i.e., "intergenerational transmission of depression"). Stressor exposure is a strong risk factor for depression, and the transmission of depression risk from mothers to daughters is partly due to mothers experiencing mo...

Background: Takotsubo syndrome (TTS) is an acute heart failure syndrome characterized by transient left ventricular dysfunction, increased myocardial biomarkers, and electrocardiographic changes. Symptoms of TTS are similar to those of acute coronary syndromes, but there is often no significant coronary stenosis. Although emotional and physical st...

Background Life stress and blunted reward processing each have been associated with the onset and maintenance of major depressive disorder. However, much of this work has been cross-sectional, conducted in separate lines of inquiry, and focused on recent life stressor exposure, despite the fact that theories of depression posit that stressors can h...

Background Although research has found that life stress is associated with reward-related brain activity, few studies have examined how cumulative stressors occurring over the entire lifetime affect reward processing during adolescence. Method To address this issue, we investigated how lifetime stressor exposure related to reward processing, index...

Objective: Although substantial research has separately investigated forgiveness, rumination, and depression in the United States, few studies have investigated all three constructs in the same sample and we know of no studies that have examined how forgiveness, rumination, and depression are interrelated across cultures. Method: To address this...

Although blunted sensitivity to reward is thought to play a key role in promoting risk for depression, most research on this topic has utilized monetary reward paradigms and focused on currently depressed adults. To address this issue, we analyzed neural reward and β-endorphin data from the Psychobiology of Stress and Adolescent Depression (PSY SAD...

Subjective stress severity appraisals have consistently emerged as better predictors of poor health than stressor exposure, but the reason for this is unclear. Subjective stress may better predict poor health for one of at least two reasons. First, because stressor exposure measures consider all stressors as equal, stress severity measures—which “w...

Background: Although characterizing associations between inflammation and depression may prove critical for informing theory, research, and treatment decisions, extant research has been limited by ignoring the possibility that inflammation may be simultaneously associated with depression broadly and with a subset of symptoms. This lack of direct co...

Our objective was to examine associations between Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and diabetes mellitus, including related conditions and preventive care practices. We used data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) 2009–2012, a cross-sectional, population-based survey, to assess ACEs, diabetes, and healthcare access in 1...

Background Maternal exposure to adversity during pregnancy has been found to affect infant brain development; however, the specific effect of prenatal crime exposure on neonatal brain connectivity remains unclear. Based on existing research, we hypothesized that living in a high-crime neighborhood during pregnancy would affect neonatal frontolimbic...

Uncertainty is inherent in most decisions humans make. Economists distinguish between two types of decision-making under non-certain conditions: those involving risk (i.e., known outcome probabilities) and those that involve ambiguity (i.e., unknown outcome probabilities). Prior research has identified individual differences that explain risk prefe...

Prior research has struggled to differentiate cortisol stress response patterns reflective of well-regulated versus dysregulated hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis function among adolescents. Here, we show how exploring profiles of joint HPA– inflammatory stress responsivity, and linking those profiles to pubertal development and peer stress...

Psychiatry stands to benefit from brief non-pharmacological treatments that effectively reduce depressive symptoms. To address this need, we conducted a single-blind randomized clinical trial assessing how a 6-day immersive psychosocial training program, followed by 10-minute daily psychosocial exercises for 30 days, improves depressive symptoms. F...

One of the most recent and potentially promising advancements in the health sciences has involved the attempted use of psychedelics for treating mental and behavioral health problems, such as anxiety, depression, posttraumatic stress disorder, and addiction. Despite surging scientific and public interest in this work, however, we presently have no...

Objective: Exposure to stressors in daily life and dysregulated stress responses are associated with increased risk for a variety of chronic mental and physical health problems, including anxiety disorders, depression, asthma, heart disease, certain cancers, and autoimmune and neurodegenerative disorders. Despite this fact, stress exposure and res...

Objective: Although exposure to abuse in early life predicts earlier pubertal timing, especially for girls, it is unclear if this association generalizes to non-abuse stressors. Additionally, the impact of race on the stress-maturation association remains unknown. To address these issues, we examined whether race moderates the effects of early adv...

Many of life’s most impactful experiences involve either social safety (e.g., acceptance, affiliation, belonging, inclusion) or social threat (e.g., conflict, isolation, rejection, exclusion). According to Social Safety Theory, these experiences greatly impact human health and behavior because a fundamental goal of the brain and immune system is to...

Although Black American mothers and infants are at higher risk for morbidity and mortality than their White counterparts, the biological mechanisms underlying these phenomena remain largely unknown. To investigate the role that lifetime stressor exposure, perceived stressor severity, and systemic inflammatory markers might play, we studied how thes...

There is increasing appreciation that certain biological processes may not be equally related to all psychiatric symptoms in a given diagnostic category. Research on the biological phenotyping of psychopathology has begun examining the etiological and treatment implications of identified biotypes; however, little attention has been paid to a critic...

Importance: How maternal experiences of adversity/advantage during pregnancy impact the developing fetus remains unclear. Objective: Using prospective data about experiences of adversity/advantage and other factors known to impact fetal developmental, we explored how these risk and protective factors relate to each other and impact infant birth wei...

Background Identifying mechanisms of major depressive disorder (MDD) that continue into remission is critical, as this may contribute subsequent depressive episodes. Biobehavioral markers related to depressogenic self-referential processing biases have been identified in depressed adults. Thus, we investigated whether these risk factors persisted d...

Although many emerging adults feel lonely and struggle to gain status during the college transition, it remains unclear whether certain personality traits facilitate this transition. Using a longitudinal design, we investigated whether status‐related traits—namely, entitlement, intrasexual competitiveness, and dominance—related to the development o...

There is increasing appreciation that certain biological processes may not be equally related to all psychiatric symptoms in a given diagnostic category. Research on the biological phenotyping of psychopathology has begun examining the etiological and treatment implications of identified biotypes; however, little attention has been paid to a critic...

Uncertainty is inherent in most decisions humans make. Economists distinguish between twotypes of decision-making under non-certain conditions: those involving risk (i.e., knownoutcome probabilities) and those that involve ambiguity (i.e., unknown outcome probabilities).Prior work has identified individual differences that explain risk preferences,...

Background: The global prevalence of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) has increased markedly in recent decades. Given the scarcity of resources available to address global health challenges and respiratory medicine being relatively under-invested in, it is important to define research priorities for COPD globally. In this paper, we aim...

Research has found that greater lifetime stressor exposure increases the risk for mental and physical health problems. Despite this, few studies have examined how stressors occurring over the entire lifespan affect sport performers’ health, well-being, and performance, partly due to the difficulty of assessing lifetime stressor exposure. To address...

Hierarchies naturally emerge in social species, and judgments of status in these hierarchies have consequences for social relationships and health. Although judgments of social status are shaped by appearance, the physical cues that inform judgments of status remain unclear. The transition to college presents an opportunity to examine judgments of...

Background Although stress is a risk factor for mental and physical health problems, it can be difficult to assess, especially on a continual, non-invasive basis. Mobile sensing data, which are continuously collected from naturalistic smartphone use, may estimate exposure to acute and chronic stressors that have health-damaging effects. This initia...

Objective The present study investigated the contribution of health risk factors (using the Charlson Comorbidity Index [CCI]) on cognitive outcomes in a sample of 380 HIV-positive (HIV+; n = 221) and HIV-seronegative (HIV−; n = 159) African American and European American adults aged 50+. Methods Participants were recruited from HIV clinics and com...

Background The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has led to increases in anxiety, depression, posttraumatic stress disorder, burnout, grief, and suicide, particularly for healthcare workers and vulnerable individuals. In some places, due to low vaccination rates and new variants of SARS-CoV-2 emerging, psychosocial strategies for remaini...

Objectives:Although life stress has been associated with worse cognitive and psychiatric functioning, few studies on this topic have examined these associations in older adults and no studies to date have assessed lifetime stress exposure in this context. Method:To address this important issue, we investigated associations between lifetime stress e...

Depression is a common, often recurrent disorder that causes substantial disease burden worldwide, and this is especially true for women following the pubertal transition. According to the Social Signal Transduction Theory of Depression, stressors involving social stress and rejection, which frequently precipitate major depressive episodes, induce...

Objectives: Although the health consequences of life stress exposure in the general population are well known, how different stressors occurring over the lifetime cause morbidity and mortality in autism is unclear, as are the factors that moderate and mediate these associations. The few studies that have compared autistic and nonautistic individua...

Introduction Although a considerable proportion of Asians in the USA experience depression, anxiety and poor sleep, these health issues have been underestimated due to the model minority myth about Asians, the stigma associated with mental illness, lower rates of treatment seeking and a shortage of culturally tailored mental health services. Indeed...

This case report describes associations between childhood adversity, adult stress exposure, and Multiple Sclerosis (MS) to highlight the intersection between mental health and neurological illness in persons with MS (PwMS). We focus on a high-adversity, high-resource patient who self-referred to mental health services for depression and suicidal id...

There is increasing appreciation that certain biological mechanisms may not be equally related to all psychiatric symptoms in a given diagnostic category. Research on the biological phenotyping of psychopathology has begun examining the etiological and treatment implications of identified biotypes; however, little attention has been paid to a criti...

Stress is a significant risk factor for the development of major depressive disorder (MDD), yet the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Preclinically, adaptive and maladaptive stress-induced changes in glutamatergic function have been observed in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). Here, we examine stress-induced changes in human mPFC glutamate...

Life stress increases risk for multiple forms of psychopathology, in part by altering neural processes involved in performance monitoring. However, the ways in which these stress-cognition effects are influenced by the specific timing and types of life stressors experienced remains poorly understood. To address this gap, we examined how different s...

Although stress strongly predicts life satisfaction, the psychosocial mechanisms underlying this association remain unclear. To investigate the possible mediating role of coping, we conducted a cross‐sectional study that assessed youths’ life stress levels; propensity to engage in active coping, internal coping, withdrawal; and life satisfaction in...

Objective Ovarian cancer is characterized by poor prognosis, high levels of distress, disturbed sleep, and compromised quality of life (QOL). Although life stressors have been shown to significantly impact physical and psychological health in cancer populations, no studies have used a high‐resolution stress assessment to differentiate effects of ac...

Objective: A sense of belonging-the subjective feeling of deep connection with social groups, physical places, and individual and collective experiences-is a fundamental human need that predicts numerous mental, physical, social, economic, and behavioural outcomes. However, varying perspectives on how belonging should be conceptualised, assessed,...

Objective Although research has examined associations between socioeconomic status (SES), gender, and acute and chronic life stressors in depression, most studies have been conducted in Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic (WEIRD) populations. Method We addressed this issue by interviewing 65 adults (55 women, Mage = 37) living in M...