Seminar Series

Preterm birth and postpartum depression are highly prevalent in the U.S. and globally, posing major risks for the health and well-being of women and their families. In this talk, Prof. Dunkel Schetter will synthesize findings from her studies on anxiety during pregnancy and its consequences for maternal and child outcomes. This program of research reveals that prenatal anxiety, defined as anxiety about a current pregnancy, independently and reliably predicts length of gestation, with evidence for HPA mechanisms as a one pathway. In the second part of her talk, Prof. Dunkel Schetter will highlight results from the Community Child Health Network (CCHN), a multisite longitudinal study of 2,500 African American, Hispanic, and non-Hispanic White mothers and 1,500 of their partners living in five low and middle-income communities across the U.S. Women were enrolled shortly after a birth and followed for two years, and if applicable, during subsequent pregnancies with in-home assessments of a subset of mothers and children at ages 3 to 5. To conclude, Prof. Dunkel Schetter will share some of her lab’s findings on how preconception maternal stress, depression, and post-traumatic stress symptoms predict birth outcomes and early child development, underscoring the importance of women’s health and well-being even before pregnancy begins.

Chris Dunkel Schetter is a Distinguished Research Professor of Psychology at UCLA. Her broad research expertise is in stress, coping, and social support in many health contexts. Her primary research program focuses on biopsychosocial processes in maternal and child health. In this work, she and collaborators examine how prenatal maternal stress and affect (e.g., depression, anxiety) predict preterm birth and low birthweight, postpartum depression, and infant and child outcomes. This work involves large-scale, prospective longitudinal studies of thousands of pregnant women utilizing in-person interviews and blood and saliva samples for biological measures. Prof. Dunkel Schetter served as one of the lead investigators on the NICHD-funded Community Child Health Network (CCHN) which was a community-based collaboration across five U.S. sites examining socioeconomic and racial/ethnic disparities within low- and middle-income families. Additional details about her work can be found on the Stress Processes in Pregnancy Lab website (https://cds.psych.ucla.edu/research/). Prof. Dunkel Schetter received her Ph.D. from Northwestern University in social psychology and completed postdoctoral training at UC Berkeley with Professor Richard Lazarus. She is the Director of the UCLA T32 training program for pre and postdoctoral fellows on Biobehavioral Issues in Mental and Physical Health supported by NIMH and in its 45th year. She is also a founder of the UCLA Health Psychology Ph.D. program and has taught graduate and undergraduate courses on stress and resilience.