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Marilyn Essex Ph.D. University of Maryland Associate Professor of Psychiatry Contact Information Waisman Center UW-Madison 1500 Highland Avenue Madison, WI 53705 608-263-7887 608-265-4008 (fax) mjessex@wisc.edu |
Last updated 2/23/2006 by rowley@waisman.wisc.edu
I am interested in the processes linking life stress with health and functioning
over the life course. For the past decade, my research has focused on the
identification of social, psychological, and biological risk factors for
childhood mental health problems and, most importantly, the ways in which risk
factors work together over multiple developmental periods. This work has been
conducted primarily within an ongoing, longitudinal study of approximately 500
families, The Wisconsin Study of Families and Work (WSFW), which currently
includes 12 waves of data across six developmental periods, from before birth
(second trimester of pregnancy) to early adolescence (grade 7), with plans to
continue through the adolescent years.
Taking advantage of this extensive longitudinal data, my collaborators and I
have addressed major unanswered questions in developmental psychopathology
regarding the timing of stress exposure, the identification of biological,
psychological, and social risk factors and their longitudinal pathways to mental
health problems, and most recently, early risk factors for mental health
trajectories extending from the transition into primary school to adolescence.
These studies have demonstrated the importance of stress exposure during the
infancy period, and especially exposure to maternal depression, for the
development of later childhood mental health problems. And importantly, taken
together with other studies in children and preclinical animal studies, the
findings suggest that stress exposure in infancy may sensitize children's
pituitary-adrenal systems (as indexed by salivary cortisol levels) as well as
their emotional responses to stress occurring later in life.
Currently, we are extending this research in two important and interrelated
ways. First, as the WSFW children enter adolescence, we are focusing our
questions on the roles of stress exposure, cortisol levels, and early child
temperamental characteristics in the development of social anxiety disorder,
which tends to emerge in early adolescence and is associated with the later
development of a variety of emotional and behavioral disorders. We have shown
that there are two longitudinal pathways to stable social inhibition and
associated social anxiety in middle and late childhood, one based on gender and
early temperamental inhibition and the other based on early stress exposure and
increased cortisol levels. Over the next several years, as the children go
through adolescence, we will continue to focus on the emergence of social
anxiety disorder. Second, we are conducting structural and functional brain
imaging studies that take advantage of the rich longitudinal data. The
structural studies are primarily concerned with the differences in morphometric
variation (especially in the hippocampus and PFC) in relation to the extent of
exposure to high levels of cortisol from preschool to adolescence. The
functional studies are focused on individual differences in responsivity of key
brain regions (especially the amygdala and PFC) in association with emotion and
emotion regulation patterns, and relations with earlier histories of stress
exposure, cortisol levels, and the development of mental health problems.
These studies provide an unprecedented opportunity to explore the pathways by
which early risk factors are associated with the neural processes underlying
emotion regulation and the onset and course of mental health problems,
especially social anxiety disorder, in adolescence. And we expect that this
research will lead to the development of new and effective prevention and
intervention strategies.
Essex, M.J., Klein, M. H., Cho, E., & Kalin, N.H.
Maternal stress beginning in
infancy may sensitize children to later stress exposure: Effects on Cortisol and
behavior, Biological Psychiatry, 52, 776-784, 2002.
Essex, M.J., Boyce, W.T., Goldstein, L.H., Armstrong, J.M., Kraemer, H.C., &
Kupfer, D.J.
The confluence of mental, physical, social, and academic
difficulties in middle childhood: II. Developing the MacArthur Health and
Behavior Questionnaire. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent
Psychiatry, 41,588-603,2002
Essex, M.J., Klein, M.H., Miech, R., & Smider, N.A.
Timing of initial exposure
to maternal major depression and children's mental health symptoms in
kindergarten. British Journal of Psychiatry, 179,151-156,2001
Ablow, J.C., Measelle, J.R., Kraemer, H.C., Harrington, R., Luby, J., Smider,
N., Dierker, L., Clark, V., Dubika, B., Heffelfinger, A., Essex, M.J., & Kupfer,
D.J.
The MacArther three-city outcome study: Evaluating multi-informant measures
of young children's symptomatology. Journal of the American Academy of Child and
Adolescent Psychiatry, 38, 1580-90, 1999.
Luby, J.L., Heffelfinger, A., Measelle, J.R., Ablow, J.C., Essex, M.J., Dierker,
L., Harrington, R., Kraemer, H.C., & Kupfer, D.J.,
Differential performance of
the MacArthur HBQ and DISC-IV in identifying DSM-IV internalizing
psychopathology in young children, JAACAP, 2002, Vol. 41: 458-466.
Essex, M.J., Klein, M.H., Cho, E., & Kraemer, K.C.,
Exposure to maternal
depression and marital conflict: Gender differences in children's later mental
health symptoms, Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent
Psychiatry, 42, 728-737, 2003.
Click to search National Library of Medicine and PubMed for other publications by Dr. Essex