Wendy Berry Mendes

• PhD
• Chair at University of California, San Francisco

Objetivo: Se cree que la estigmatización contribuye a las disparidades de salud que experimentan adultos gays, lesbianas, y bisexuales (LGB, por sus siglas en inglés). Sin embargo, pocos estudios han examinado cómo el estigma moldea la percepción y la respuesta al estrés diario según el grupo de orientación sexual, un importante mecanismo potencial...

We investigated whether sadness leaves an “emotional residue” by inducing sadness in one individual and testing its transfer to an unaware new acquaintance. Participants (N = 230; 115 dyads) completed cooperative tasks in same-gender dyads. Before meeting, participants recalled a personal event. In half the dyads, one participant (sad actor) recall...

Objective Stress is a driver of depression, and people with depression often struggle to cope with stress and anxiety. This study directly compares the mental health effects of a Wim Hof Method intervention to an active control condition (slow breathing) in women with high stress and high depressive symptoms. Methods We randomized 84 healthy midli...

Objetivo: Estudios transversales anteriores han demostrado que más (frente a menos) personas sexualmente activas tienden a ser mental y físicamente más saludables, pero se sabe poco sobre los mecanismos proximales subyacentes a tales asociaciones. Métodos: Analizamos dos conjuntos de datos de muestreo de experiencias (N = 8,452, 66,181 observacione...

Background Poor person-centered maternal care (PCMC) contributes to high maternal mortality and morbidity, directly and indirectly, through lack of, delayed, inadequate, unnecessary, or harmful care. While evidence on poor PCMC prevalence, as well as inequities, expanded in the last decade, there is still a significant gap in evidence-based interve...

Background: Pelvic floor yoga has been recommended as a complementary treatment strategy for urinary incontinence (UI) in women, but evidence of its efficacy is lacking. Objective: To evaluate the effects of a therapeutic pelvic floor yoga program versus a nonspecific physical conditioning program on UI in women. Design: Randomized trial. (Cli...

Background Poor person-centered maternal care (PCMC) contributes to high maternal mortality and morbidity, directly and indirectly, through lack of, delayed, inadequate, unnecessary, or harmful care. While evidence on poor PCMC prevalence, as well as inequities, expanded in the last decade, there is still a significant gap in evidence-based interve...

Childhood maltreatment has been linked to adult somatic symptoms, although this has rarely been examined in daily life. Furthermore, the localization of somatization associated with childhood maltreatment and its subtypes is unknown. This large-scale experience sampling study used body maps to examine the relationships between childhood maltreatmen...

Introduction: Sleep and stress processes shape executive function. Evidence suggests that poor sleep regulation can lead to significant impairments in executive functions. Psychological stress can also directly impact a variety of executive functions, often leading to declines, but may additionally reduce executive function via its negative impact...

Paced breathing—longer exhalation than inhalation—can show short-term improvement of physiologic responses and affective well-being, though most studies have relied on narrow sample demographics, small samples, and control conditions that fail to address expectancy effects. We addressed these limitations through an app-based experiment where partic...

Objective To assess the impact of the Caring for Providers to Improve Patient Experience (CPIPE) intervention, which sought to improve person‐centered maternal care (PCMC) by addressing two key drivers: provider stress and bias. Methods CPIPE was successfully piloted over 6 months in two health facilities in Migori County, Kenya, in 2022. The eval...

Objective: To assess the impact of the Caring for Providers to Improve Patient Experience (CPIPE) intervention, which sought to improve person-centered maternal care (PCMC) by addressing two key drivers: provider stress and bias. Methods: CPIPE was successfully piloted over 6-months in two health facilities in Migori County, Kenya in 2022. The eval...

How does physiological reactivity to emotional experiences change with age? Previous studies addressing this question have mostly been conducted in laboratory settings during which emotions are induced via pictures, films, or relived memories, raising external validity questions. In the present research, we draw upon two datasets collected using ec...

Objective Physiologic responses of surgery team members under varying levels of intraoperative risk were measured. Background Measurement of intraoperative physiological responses provides insight into how operation complexity, phase of surgery, and surgeon seniority impact stress. Methods Autonomic nervous system responses (interbeat intervals,...

Objective: This study examines the within- and between-person associations of acute and chronic stress with blood pressure (BP) and heart rate (HR) using an app-based research platform. Methods: We examined data from 31,964 adults (aged 18-90) in an app-based ecological momentary assessment study that used a research-validated optic sensor to me...

Social relationships influence physical health, yet questions remain regarding the nature of this association. For instance, when it comes to predicting health-relevant processes in daily life, few studies have examined (a) the relative importance of both positive and negative relational experiences, and (b) variability in relational experiences (i...

Abstract Background Person-centered maternity care (PCMC) has become a priority in the global health discourse on quality of care due to the high prevalence of disrespectful and lack of responsive care during facility-based childbirth. Although PCMC is generally sub-optimal, there are significant disparities. On average, women of low socioeconomic...

Objective: To understand the association between psychosocial stressors and cardiovascular health by evaluating: (a) lifespan patterns of childhood and adulthood stressors in relation to hemodynamic acute stress reactivity and recovery and (b) the role of optimism in these associations. Method: Participants (n = 1,092, 56% women, 21% racial/ethn...

Impairments in cardiac vagal control (CVC) have been independently linked to smoking status and depression and are implicated in self-regulatory processes that may exacerbate depressive symptoms and maintain smoking behavior. Yet, few studies have examined how depressive symptoms, even at low levels, influence CVC reactivity among individuals who s...

Background Sleep can have consequential effects on people’s health and well-being, and these effects may vary among younger and older adults. Purpose The goal of the present study was to investigate how sleep relates to physiologic and stress responses in daily life across adulthood. Methods We used an Ecological Momentary Assessment method in a...

Background Maternity providers, including nurses, midwives, physicians, are at significant risk for stress and burnout due to the nature of care provision in maternal and child health settings. Yet, the empirical evidence on stress and burnout among maternity providers in sub-Saharan Africa is scarce. Therefore, the purpose of our study was to (1)...

Identifying factors that influence how individuals who smoke cigarettes respond to stress is important as stress is a risk factor for smoking and its maintenance. This study examined the modulatory role of cardiac vagal control (CVC), a physiological correlate of self-regulation, on cognitive stress appraisal processes of adults who smoke. Sixty da...

Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the lives of many people. The risk and interpersonal cost of infection as well as the public health measures implemented to mitigate the spread likely have psychological costs. Yet, due to the ever-changing nature of the pandemic, psychological impact has been difficult to capture through research ef...

This study examined effects of experimentally-induced optimism on physical activity and stress reactivity with community volunteers. Using an intervention to induce short-term optimism, we conducted two harmonized randomized experiments, performed simultaneously at separate academic institutions. All participants were randomized to either the induc...

Gratitude and optimism are positive psychological dispositions associated with beneficial outcomes. To examine their associations with physiological and psychological experiences in daily life, we examined data from an Ecological Momentary Assessment study (N = 4,825), including blood pressure, heart rate, and reports of stress, health behaviors, a...

Patients and psychotherapists often exhibit behavioral, psychological, and physiological similarity. Here, we test whether oxytocin—a neuropeptide that can enhance expressivity and social perception—influences time-lagged “linkage” of autonomic nervous system responses among participants and facilitators during group therapy. Physiological linkage...

Significance Exaggerated blood pressure (BP) reactivity is associated with the development of hypertension and cardiovascular disease. Stress, and, to a lesser extent, emotions are suggested to be linked to BP reactivity, but this theorizing lacks robust evidence beyond small laboratory or field studies with narrow participant demographics. Using a...

Mere observation of others experiencing stress is often sufficient to evoke stress vicariously, especially when people try to understand the situation from the viewpoint of others. Here, we tested whether and how the experience of vicarious stress, facilitated by perspective-taking, would influence individuals' affective and motivational reactions...

Does acute stress differentially alter cognitive functioning in older versus younger adults? While older adults may be better at handling stress psychologically, their physiological systems are less elastic, potentially impairing the cognitive functioning of older adults after a stressor. We examined cognition following an acute stressor among olde...

Although research suggests distressed individuals benefit from others' empathy, it is unclear how an individual's level of empathy influences dyadic responses during emotional situations. In the current study, female participants (N = 140; 70 dyads) were paired with a stranger. One member of each dyad (the experiencer) was randomly assigned to unde...

Civic engagement can be empowering and might promote well-being, especially for individuals from marginalized backgrounds. This study uses a novel experimental approach to simulate civic engagement in a laboratory study and to test whether this approach engenders civic empowerment and buffers psychological and physiological reactivity to stress and...

Significance In our prospective study using nationally representative data from 13,611 adults in the US Health and Retirement Study, we used traditional and machine-learning statistical approaches to reveal the most important factors across the behavioral and social sciences that predict mortality in older adults. In the study, we found that top pr...

Parents can influence children's emotional responses through direct and subtle behavior. In this study we examined how parents' acute stress responses might be transmitted to their 7- to 11-year-old children and how parental emotional suppression would affect parents' and children's physiological responses and behavior. Parents and their children (...

Many of the most important decisions in our society are made within groups, yet we know little about how the physiological responses of group members predict the decisions that groups make. In the current work, we examine whether physiological linkage from “senders” to “receivers”—which occurs when a sender’s physiological response predicts a recei...

Sleep problems are increasingly being recognized as a public health epidemic with data suggesting that over 69% of US adults get less sleep than they need. Despite the important role that sleep plays in our lives, sleep has been historically absent from the social psychological literature. Recently, however, researchers have started recognizing the...

Deciphering others’ affect is ubiquitous in daily life and is important for navigating social interactions and relationships. Research has found that behavioral components, such as facial expressions or body language, are critical channels by which people understand other people’s affect. In the current research, we examined how people’s perception...

Objectives Mindfulness-based interventions have been found to reduce psychological and physiological stress reactivity. In obesity, however, stress reactivity is complex, with studies showing both exaggerated and blunted physiological responses to stressors. A nuanced view of stress reactivity is the “challenge and threat” framework, which defines...

The degree to which experimenters shape participant behavior has long been of interest in experimental social science research. Here, we extend this question to the domain of peripheral psychophysiology, where experimenters often have direct, physical contact with participants, yet researchers do not consistently test for their influence. We descri...

Purpose: To evaluate the effects of device-guided slow-paced respiration on urgency-associated urinary symptoms, perceived stress and anxiety, and autonomic function in women with overactive bladder syndrome. Materials and methods: We conducted a randomized, parallel-group trial of slow-paced respiration to improve perceived stress and autonomic...

Objective: This set of studies examines the bi-directional links between social rejection and sleep, a ubiquitous and increasingly problematic health behavior. Methods: In Study 1, a multi-day field experiment, 43 participants completed a neutral task just prior to sleep on night 1 and a social rejection task on night 2. Objective and subjective...

Parents often try to hide their negative emotions from their kids, hoping to protect them from experiencing adverse responses. However, suppression has been linked with poor social interactions. Suppression may be particularly damaging in the context of parent–child relationships because it may hinder parents’ ability to support children’s emotion...

Objective: The aim of the study was to examine whether anxiety and depressive symptoms are associated with an adverse cardiac autonomic profile among midlife women with hot flashes. Methods: Anxiety and depressive symptoms were evaluated by validated self-administered questionnaires among peri- and postmenopausal women in a randomized trial of s...

Objectives: Anger expression is assumed to have mostly negative health effects. Yet, evidence is mixed on how anger expression influences African Americans’ cardiovascular health. The present research aimed to clarify this link by examining moderating effects of chronic discrimination on the relationship between anger expression and cardiovascular...

Objective: Evidence links depression and stress to more rapid progression of HIV-1 disease. We conducted a randomized controlled trial to test whether an intervention aimed at improving stress management and emotion regulation, mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), would improve immunological (i.e. CD4+ t-cell counts) and psychological outcom...

Stress can influence health throughout the lifespan, yet there is little agreement about what types and aspects of stress matter most for human health and disease. This is in part because "stress" is not a monolithic concept but rather, an emergent process that involves interactions between individual and environmental factors, historical and curre...

Objective: Research has long sought to identify which individuals are best at accurately perceiving others' personalities or are good judges, yet consistent predictors of this ability have been difficult to find. In the current studies, we revisit this question by examining a novel physiological correlate of social sensitivity, cardiac vagal flexi...

Scholars in psychology, physiology, and neuroscience have long been interested in studying shared physiological experiences between people. Many researchers want to know whether people who are interacting with each other experience similar physiological responses as one another and, if so, why. Given recent technological and analytic advances, the...

Throughout the world, groups that are socially disadvantaged have poorer health compared to groups that are more advantaged. This book examines the role that stigma and discrimination play in creating and sustaining these group health disparities. Stigma is a social construction in which people who are distinguished by a “mark” are viewed as devian...

During interracial encounters, well-intentioned European Americans sometimes engage in subtle displays of anxiety, which can be interpreted as signs of racial bias by African American partners. In the present research, same-race and cross-race stranger dyads ( N = 123) engaged in getting-acquainted tasks, during which measures of sympathetic nervou...

Scholars across domains in psychology, physiology, and neuroscience have long been interested in the study of shared physiological experiences between people. Recent technological and analytic advances allow researchers to examine new questions about how shared physiological experiences come about. Yet, comprehensive guides that address the theoret...

Scholars across domains in psychology, physiology, and neuroscience have long been interested in the study of shared physiological experiences between people. Recent technological and analytic advances allow researchers to examine new questions about how shared physiological experiences come about. Yet, comprehensive guides that address the theoret...

Intranasal administration of the hypothalamic neuropeptide oxytocin (OT) has, in some studies, been associated with positive effects on social perception and cognition. Similarly, positive emotion inductions can improve a range of perceptual and performance-based behaviors. In this exploratory study, we examined how OT administration and positive e...

Objective: Abnormalities in autonomic function are posited to play a pathophysiologic role in menopausal hot flashes. We examined relationships between resting cardiac autonomic activity and hot flashes in perimenopausal and postmenopausal women. Methods: Autonomic function was assessed at baseline and 12 weeks among perimenopausal and postmenop...

Coordinated social behavior and positive affect shared between parent and child in early life provide a foundation for healthy social and emotional development. We examined physiological (cardiac vagal responses) and relational (attachment security) predictors of dyadic behavioral coordination in a sample of 13-month-old infants and their mothers (...

Background and objectives: Although it has been postulated that psychological responses to stress in adulthood are grounded in childhood experiences in the family environment, evidence has been inconsistent. This study tested whether two putative measures of neurobiological sensitivity (vagal flexibility and attentional capacity) moderated the rel...

Intranasal administration of the neuropeptide oxytocin (OT) appears to have positive social consequences, but these effects are often highly context- and person-specific. The present research examined whether the core personality trait of extraversion may be one important person-specific factor that plays a role in these associations. Across two do...

This research examined the influence of social stress on risk processes in youths. Study 1 (N = 89) randomly assigned male youths to perform either a stressful social-evaluative or nonstressful control task followed by a risk-perception measure. Compared to controls, social stress participants perceived less risk in their environment. Study 2 (N =...

Strong social and legal norms in the United States discourage the overt expression of bias against ethnic and racial minorities, increasing the attributional ambiguity of Whites' positive behavior to ethnic minorities. Minorities who suspect that Whites' positive overtures toward minorities are motivated more by their fear of appearing racist than...

Core features of motivational states—approach, avoidance, engagement, and disengagement—may be reliably measured from a variety of neurobiological changes, including autonomic nervous system, neural activity, neuroendocrine systems, and cell biology. The goals of this chapter are to review various biological systems that are concomitant with distin...

This research explores vagal flexibility—dynamic modulation of cardiac vagal control—as an individual-level physiological index of social sensitivity. In four studies, we test the hypothesis that individuals with greater cardiac vagal flexibility, operationalized as higher cardiac vagal tone at rest and greater cardiac vagal withdrawal (indexed by...

Social rank in human and non-human animals is signaled by a variety of behaviors and phenotypes. In this research, we examined whether a sartorial manipulation of social class would engender class-consistent behavior and physiology during dyadic interactions. Male participants donned clothing that signaled either upper-class (business-suit) or lowe...

Objective: Disruptions in stress response system development have been posited as mechanisms linking child maltreatment (CM) to psychopathology. Existing theories predict elevated sympathetic nervous system reactivity after CM, but evidence for this is inconsistent. We present a novel framework for conceptualizing stress reactivity after CM that u...

We examined the interplay of psychosocial risk and protective factors in daily experiences of health. In Study 1, the tendency to anxiously expect rejection from racial outgroup members, termed race-based rejection sensitivity (RS-race), was cross-sectionally related to greater stress-symptoms among Black adults who reported fewer cross-race friend...

Emotions, thoughts and intentions are not simply concepts that live privately in our minds, but rather affective states emanate from us and may influence those around us. We explored affect contagion in the context of one of the closest dyadic units, mother and infant. We initially separated mothers and infants and randomly assigned mothers to expe...

Although higher social class carries mental and physical health benefits, these advantages are less robust among members of racial and ethnic minority groups than among European Americans. We explore whether differential reactions to discrimination may be a factor in explaining why. Working-class and middle-class Latino American women engaged in an...

Epidemiological and animal studies often find that higher social status is associated with better physical health outcomes, but these findings are by design correlational and lack mediational explanations. In two studies, we examine neurobiological reactivity to test the hypothesis that higher social status leads to salutary short-term psychologica...

Emotions, thoughts and intentions are not simply concepts that live privately in our minds, but rather affective states emanate from us and may influence those around us. We explored affect contagion in the context of one of the closest dyadic units, mother and infant. We initially separated mothers and infants and randomly assigned mothers to expe...

Disgust reactions can be elicited using stimuli that engender orogastric rejection (e.g., pus and vomit; core disgust stimuli) but also using images of bloody injuries or medical procedures (e.g., surgeries; blood [body] boundary violation [B-BV] disgust stimuli). These two types of disgust reaction are presumed to be connected by a common evolutio...

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is a pervasive problem associated with debilitating impairments in social settings. This research explored the affective and physiological reactions to social evaluation and examined the efficacy of an arousal reappraisal intervention in altering cardiovascular reactivity and affective responses. Across two studies, so...

Negative social feedback is often a source of distress. However, self-verification theory provides the counterintuitive explanation that negative feedback leads to less distress when it is consistent with chronic self-views. Drawing from this work, the present study examined the impact of receiving self-verifying feedback on outcomes largely neglec...

Measurement effects exist throughout the sciences-the act of measuring often changes the properties of the observed. We suggest emotion research is no exception. The awareness and conscious assessment required by self-report of emotion may significantly alter emotional processes. In this study, participants engaged in a difficult math task designed...

Objective: This article considers how the social psychology of intergroup processes helps to explain the presence and persistence of health disparities between members of socially advantaged and disadvantaged groups. Method: Social psychological theory and research on intergroup relations, including prejudice, discrimination, stereotyping, stigma,...

Contrary to lay beliefs, physiological changes that co-occur with stress are not necessarily bad. Much can be done during stressful experiences to promote adaptive responses. In this article, we review recent research on one method for improving acute stress responses: reappraising arousal. A growing body of research suggests that cognitive apprais...

Many ancient contemplative traditions believe presence of mind promotes greater longevity, a belief that is hard to test. Scientific evidence suggests that mind wandering predicts unhappiness, whereas presence in the moment predicts well-being. It is important to test whether a tendency toward mind wandering is associated with biological measures o...

Prior research has revealed racial disparities in health outcomes and health-compromising behaviors, such as smoking and drug abuse. It has been suggested that discrimination contributes to such disparities, but the mechanisms through which this might occur are not well understood. In the research reported here, we examined whether the experience o...

We examined individuals' tendencies to exaggerate their positive responses toward stigmatized others (i.e., overcorrect) and explored how overcorrection, because of its fragile nature, could be disrupted. The first 2 studies demonstrate overcorrection: White participants paired with Black partners (Experiment 1A) smiled, laughed, and showed more po...

The present study examined how individual differences in motivation to respond without prejudice predict self-reported negative affect and physiological responses to the prejudicial acts of others. One hundred and one White participants were paired with a Black “partner” and together they watched two White men on film having either a pro- or antidi...

We sought to demonstrate that individuals who anticipate interacting with a prejudiced cross-race/ethnicity partner show an exacerbated stress response, as measured through both self-report and hemodynamic and vascular responses, compared with individuals anticipating interacting with a nonprejudiced cross-race/ethnicity partner. Through a question...

Animal research indicates that oxytocin is involved in social behavior, stress regulation, and positive physiologic adaptation. This study examines whether oxytocin enhances adaptive responses to social stress and compares effects between men and women. Hypotheses were tested with a placebo-controlled, double-blind experiment. Social stress was ind...

Previous research suggests that cortisol can affect cognitive functions such as memory, decision making, and attentiveness to threat-related cues. Here, we examine whether increases in cortisol, brought on by an acute social stressor, influence threat-related decision making. Eighty-one police officers completed a standardized laboratory stressor a...

In this chapter, we explore brain and body mechanisms that link the experience of stereotype threat to changes in cognitive and behavioral performance. We begin by identifying a model of causal sequences of stereotype threat: psychological states associated with stereotype threat, neurobiological responses triggered by these psychological states, a...

Researchers have theorized that changing the way we think about our bodily responses can improve our physiological and cognitive reactions to stressful events. However, the underlying processes through which mental states improve downstream outcomes are not well understood. To this end, we examined whether reappraising stress-induced arousal could...

Diverse lines of evidence point to a basic human aversion to physically harming others. First, we demonstrate that unwillingness to endorse harm in a moral dilemma is predicted by individual differences in aversive reactivity, as indexed by peripheral vasoconstriction. Next, we tested the specific factors that elicit the aversive response to harm....

Numerous studies have demonstrated that racial bias influences the decision to fire weapons for non-police officer samples. However, little evidence exists about how these biases operate under stressful situations. We investigated police officers’ decisions to shoot Black and White targets carrying guns or objects in a computer simulation. Officers...

Perceiving discrimination is a chronic stressor that may negatively impact health. We predicted that the relationship between chronic perceptions of discrimination and chronic stress, as indexed by resting blood pressure, would be moderated by individual differences in system-justifying beliefs (SJBs), specifically the extent to which people believ...