Pathways to Resilience III: Beyond Nature vs. Nurture

Beyond Allostatic Load: Rethinking the Role of Stress in Regulating Child Development and Resilience
Speaker: Bruce J. Ellis
How do exposures to stress, such as repeated or chronic childhood adversity, affect social and cognitive functioning? The usual answer to this question highlights impairments to growth, learning, and behavior. This approach emphasizes “What’s wrong with youth?” who come from harsh environments. In this talk Dr. Ellis instead takes a strength-based approach and asks: “What’s right with these youth?” Guided by evolutionary-developmental models of biological sensitivity to context and adaptive calibration, he will discuss how youth who develop in harsh environments specialize their stress physiology, social and reproductive development, and cognitive abilities to match high-adversity contexts. He will also argue that we need to understand the coherent, functional biobehavioral changes that occur in response to stress over time to better understand the potential cost of these changes (e.g., stress-related physical and mental illness).