Grant: CIHR Fellowship

Adolescence is naturally stressful for youth and their parents, especially in recent years, as adolescents must prepare for a rapidly changing labor market in the shadow of a pandemic. Outdated models of stress emphasizing that stress is bad persist in research, medicine, and culture, sometimes influencing parents to encourage adolescents to avoid stress indiscriminately. Yet, stress is not always a bad thing - it can help us grow. In their journey toward becoming fulfilled adults, adolescents would thus benefit from learning how to optimize their stress when engaging with valuable yet demanding opportunities. My innovative postdoctoral project is about understanding how adolescents regulate stress and empowering parents to provide healthy, supportive guidance during stressful moments. I will bridge together different stress and emotion regulation theories in novel ways to better inform how parents should talk about stress with their adolescents. This will result in a brief intervention that procures a more positive mindset about stress and challenges in parents. Using a combination of advanced methods and technology (e.g., measuring stress hormones and cardiac reactivity and using AI to analyze the effect of parents' choice of words), I will test whether this so-called "stress optimization" intervention has the potential to foster healthier stress responses in 500 dyads of parents and adolescents, and promote challenge seeking in adolescents. Once I have tested the role of parents' mindsets in how adolescents respond to laboratory social stressors, I will conduct a second study to test if the benefits of this intervention are seen beyond the laboratory and last in time, when adolescents face real-life social stressors.