Stress and Coping in Families

Economic, interpersonal, and traumatic stressors challenge family relationships. We examine the impact of stress on coping behaviors in parents and the potential role of physiological reactivity in undermining effective coping strategies for parents with a history of trauma.

Interpersonal Trauma in Early Childhood

Relatively little attention has been paid to the potential effects of “polytrauma” on emotion, behavioral, and cognitive functioning in early childhood, compared to later developmental stages. Our work examines the potential unique effects of exposure to different types
of interpersonal trauma on clinical and relational phenotypes among predominately low-income, multi-racial children under the age of six and their primary caregivers.

The Biological Embedding of Traumatic Stress

Dr. Hagan is the Co-Investigator of a pilot study based at the UCSF Child Trauma Research Program, under the leadership of Dr. Nicole Bush and Dr. Alicia Lieberman, designed to test whether an empirically-validated intensive dyadic psychotherapeutic treatment improves biological functioning (e.g., neuroendocrine system functioning, inflammatory processes, cellular aging) in young traumatized children and their biological mothers. Dr. Hagan's work focuses on the associations between parent-child relationship functioning, chronic levels of cortisol activity, and markers of inflammation.