TY - JOUR
T1 - Adversity, Adaptive Calibration, and Health
T2 - The Case of Disadvantaged Families
AU - Cabeza de Baca, Tomás
AU - Wahl, Richard A.
AU - Barnett, Melissa A.
AU - Figueredo, Aurelio José
AU - Ellis, Bruce J.
N1 - Funding Information:
Acknowledgments TCDB was partially supported by a National Institute of Mental Health grant T32MH019391. The authors would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of the paper.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2016, Springer International Publishing.
PY - 2016/6/1
Y1 - 2016/6/1
N2 - Epidemiologists and medical researchers often employ an allostatic load model that focuses on environmental and lifestyle factors, together with biological vulnerabilities, to explain the deterioration of human physiological systems and chronic degenerative disease. Although this perspective has informed medicine and public health, it is agnostic toward the functional significance of pathophysiology and health deterioration. Drawing on Life History (LH) theory, the current paper reviews the literature on disadvantaged families to serve as a conceptual model of stress-health relationships in which the allocation of reproductive effort is instantiated in the LH strategies of individuals and reflects the bioenergetic and material resource tradeoffs. We propose that researchers interested in health disparities reframe chronic degenerative diseases as outcomes resulting from strategic calibration of physiological systems to best adapt, survive, and reproduce in response to demands of specific developmental contexts. These effects of adversity on later-age degenerative disease are mediated, in part, by socioemotional and cognitive mechanisms expressed in different life history strategies.
AB - Epidemiologists and medical researchers often employ an allostatic load model that focuses on environmental and lifestyle factors, together with biological vulnerabilities, to explain the deterioration of human physiological systems and chronic degenerative disease. Although this perspective has informed medicine and public health, it is agnostic toward the functional significance of pathophysiology and health deterioration. Drawing on Life History (LH) theory, the current paper reviews the literature on disadvantaged families to serve as a conceptual model of stress-health relationships in which the allocation of reproductive effort is instantiated in the LH strategies of individuals and reflects the bioenergetic and material resource tradeoffs. We propose that researchers interested in health disparities reframe chronic degenerative diseases as outcomes resulting from strategic calibration of physiological systems to best adapt, survive, and reproduce in response to demands of specific developmental contexts. These effects of adversity on later-age degenerative disease are mediated, in part, by socioemotional and cognitive mechanisms expressed in different life history strategies.
KW - Adversity
KW - Chronic degenerative disease
KW - Disadvantaged families
KW - Evolutionary psychology
KW - Harshness
KW - Life history theory
KW - Stress
KW - Unpredictability
KW - Unpredictability schema
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U2 - 10.1007/s40750-016-0042-z
DO - 10.1007/s40750-016-0042-z
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84994908722
SN - 2198-7335
VL - 2
SP - 93
EP - 115
JO - Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology
JF - Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology
IS - 2
ER -