What happens when romantic couples discuss personal loss? Relational, emotional, and physiological impacts.

Does talking about loss with a romantic partner have salutary personal and relationship effects? Prior evidence reveals the benefits of emotional disclosure in couple relationships, yet disclosure about loss has been overlooked in research on couple communication. Using a novel communication paradigm with young-adult heterosexual romantic partners ( = 114 couples), we investigated emotions, physiological arousal (skin conductance responses [SCR]), and relationship closeness when narrating a personal loss and listening to the partner's loss, and compared these loss discussions to discussions about desired relationship changes. Based on partners' self-reports, narrating loss elicited more vulnerable and, unexpectedly, more antagonistic emotions.

Does the cortisol awakening response link childhood adversity to adult BMI?

Objectives: Childhood adversity is a risk factor for the development of obesity in adulthood. Dysregulated hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) activity, which has been associated separately with both adverse childhood experiences and obesity, has been posited as a mechanism by which stressful experiences influence body mass index (BMI); however, this mechanism has not yet been tested longitudinally. The present study uses multireporter, longitudinal data across three time points to test whether the adolescent cortisol awakening response (CAR), an index of diurnal HPA activity, mediates the association between adversity in childhood and BMI in adulthood.

Adolescent Life Stress and the Cortisol Awakening Response: The Moderating Roles of Attachment and Sex.

This longitudinal study investigated how past versus current life stresses relate to adolescents' cortisol awakening response (CAR), an index of hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal activity. Ninety-nine adolescents reported previous year life stress at ages 12 and 18. At the second assessment, participants also provided self-reports of parent and peer attachment and 3 days of cortisol samples.

Adolescents' Daily Worry, Morning Cortisol, and Health Symptoms.

Purpose: To assess short-term effects of daily worries on hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis activity and later implications for adolescents' health symptoms. We hypothesized that heightened worry would be associated with stronger next-morning cortisol awakening response (CAR) to prepare the body for the demands of the upcoming day. Guided by biological adaptation to stress theories, we also hypothesized that dysregulated CAR would heighten associations between worries and later health symptoms, while also testing direct associations between worries and dysregulated CAR and health.