Advancing the Science of Learning, Health, and Behavior

The Center's Distinguished Scholars Lecture Series is open to all University students, faculty, and the general public and provides a venue to interact with distinguished scholars whose creative research has made significant advances in the field of child development. This series spotlights these leaders’ bold contributions to the science of child development and the implications of their research on the worlds of education, policy, public health, medicine, justice, and economic development. The series analyzes how their research catalyzes new ways of thinking across disciplines to inform policy and practice.

Lecture Video

The Brain on Stress: How the Social Environment
“Gets Under the Skin”

Bruce S. McEwen, Ph.D.

Alfred E. Mirsky Professor, Head of the Harold and Margaret Milliken Hatch Laboratory of Neuroendocrinology
The Rockefeller University 

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Abstract:

Stress is a condition of the mind and a factor in the expression of disease that differs among individuals and reflects not only major life events but also the conflicts and pressures of daily life that elevate physiological systems so as to cause a chronic stress burden. This burden reflects not only the impact of life experiences but also of genetic variations; individual life-style habits such as diet, exercise, sleep and substance abuse; and epigenetic modifications in development and throughout life that set life-long patterns of behavior and physiological reactivity through both biological embedding and cumulative change. Hormones associated with the chronic stress burden protect the body in the short-run and promote adaptation (allostasis), but, in the long run, the burden of chronic stress causes changes in the brain and body that lead to disease (allostatic load). Brain circuits are plastic and remodeled by stress so as to change the balance between anxiety, mood control, memory and decision making. Such changes may have adaptive value in danger but their persistence and lack of reversibility can be maladaptive. Besides developmental influences associated with mother-infant interactions, the most potent of stressors in adult life are those arising from the social environment that can affect both brain and body. Social ordering in human society is associated with gradients of disease, with an increasing frequency or mortality and morbidity along a gradient of decreasing income and education (socioeconomic status, SES). Although the causes of these gradients of health are very complex, they are likely to reflect, with increasing frequency going down the SES ladder, the cumulative burden of coping with limited resources, toxic environments and negative life events as well as differences in life style, and resulting chronic activation of physiological systems involved in adaptation. Acknowledgments: NIMH grants RO1 MH 41256 5 P50 MH58911; MacArthur Foundation Research Network for Socioeconomic Status and Health and the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child.

Bruce S. McEwen, Ph.D., is the Alfred E. Mirsky Professor and Head of the Harold and Margaret Milliken Hatch Laboratory of Neuroendocrinology at The Rockefeller University. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences. He served as Dean of Graduate Studies from 1991-93 and as President of the Society for Neuroscience in 1997-98. As a neuroscientist and neuroendocrinologist, McEwen studies environmentally-regulated, variable gene expression in brain mediated by circulating steroid hormones and endogenous neurotransmitters in relation to brain sexual differentiation and the actions of sex, stress and thyroid hormones on the adult brain. His laboratory discovered adrenal steroid receptors in the hippocampus in 1968. His laboratory combines molecular, anatomical, pharmacological, physiological and behavioral methodologies and relates their findings to human clinical information. His current research focuses on stress effects on amygdala and prefrontal cortex as well as hippocampus, and his laboratory also investigates sex hormone effects and sex differences in these brain regions. In addition, he served on the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Socioeconomic Status and Health, in which he helped to reformulate concepts and measurements related to stress and stress hormones in the context of human societies. This led to the concept of “allostatic load” that describes the wear and tear on the body and brain from chronic stress and related life style behaviors that lead to dysregulation of physiological stress pathways that are normally protective. He is also a member of the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, which focuses on healthy brain development as a key to physical and mental health. He is the co-author of book with science writer Elizabeth Lasley for a lay audience called “The End of Stress as We Know It” published in 2002 by the Joseph Henry Press and the Dana Press and another book with science writer Harold M. Schmeck, Jr. called “The Hostage Brain” published in 1994 by The Rockefeller University Press.

Past Lecture Series

Read about the 2009-2010 Distinguished Scholars Lecture Series >>