Stress and Coping in Ethnic Minority Families

Economic, interpersonal, and traumatic stressors challenge all family relationships; ethnic minority individuals in the United States experience additional stressors related to discrimination, ancestral trauma, or immigration. We examine the impact of different stressors (interpersonal, structural, political, historical) on mental health functioning in young adults and families. 

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.