ResearcH

Current Projects & Collaborations

Below are description of a few of the current projects in the lab.

The Role of Personality in
Cognitive Aging & Dementia

Our new project leverages a longitudinal, measurement burst design involving ecological momentary assessments in order to study markers of personality in everyday life, and use these to test hypotheses regarding personality-related risk for cognitive decline and personality change as a marker of impairment. Our grant capitalizes upon the new Einstein Aging Study, which will follow up to 600 older adults across 4 years and collect data on stress, a!ect, cognitive performance, physiological biomarkers including inflammation, and sleep. This project involves SBU collaborators Sean Clouston and Nick Eaton, as well as personality and aging experts at Northwestern University Dan Mroczek and Eileen Graham, the Einstein EAS team including Mindy Katz, Richard Lipton, Cuiling Wang, and Molly Zimmerman, and consultants Andreas Neubauer and Martin Sliwinski.

EAS, as well as the ESCAPE study described below, use a measurement burst design. Check out our recent chapter on measurement burst designs here:

Cho, G., Pasquini, G., & Scott, S. (2019). Measurement burst designs in lifespan developmental research. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Psychology. Oxford University Press. 

 

 

 

 

Responding to COVID-19: NIA
Administrative Supplement
(2020)

The Einstein Aging Study was in the process of data collection when COVID-19 emerged in New York City in March 2020. This was, and continues to be, a significant event especially given the sample of the Einstein Aging Study is both demographically (i.e., older adults) and geographically (i.e., living in Bronx County) at risk for severe outcomes related to COVID-19. To account for COVID-19 and its effects such as social distancing recommendations, our team is collaborating with Andrew Schwartz in the Computer Science department at Stony Brook to use publicly-available Twitter posts to quantify community indicators related to COVID-19. This approach will allow us to characterize specific time periods so that we can characterize the “social climate” during which data collection occurred.

Additive e!ects of forecasted and reported
stressors on negative a!ect.

Many breast cancer survivors report memory loss and difficulty concentrating; for some survivors, these problems persist for months and years after treatment. Despite self-reports of these problems, relatively low numbers of survivors meet clinical criteria for cognitive impairment. In this study, breast cancer survivors visit the lab to answer surveys on their recent memory problems and fatigue and complete neuropsychological testing. Then, the research assistants train the participants to use study smartphones to complete brief surveys about their mood and recent experiences and “brain games” involving working memory, attention, and processing speed. This study is an example of an ecological momentary assessment design – participants carry the study smartphones for 2 weeks and complete the surveys and games as they go about their daily routines. The goals of this study are to examine how the relationship between breast cancer survivors’ lab and daily cognitive performance and to identify predictors of the survivors who are at-risk for cognitive problems and the times at which these are likely to occur. We use ambulatory cognitive assessments developed by Drs. Martin Sliwinski and Jacqueline Mogle at Penn State. This study is supported by the National Cancer Institute grant R03 CA191712 to Drs. Stacey Scott and Brent Small. It is a collaboration between researchers at Stony Brook University, University of South Florida, and H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center.

Chronic Stress as a Pathway
to Health Disparities

Socio-economic status is associated with wide disparities in health, including risk for chronic diseases and early death. This project involves analyzing data from the Effects of Stress on Cognitive Aging, Physiology, & Emotion (ESCAPE) study in order to test whether chronic stress helps to explain why individuals with lower SES have poorer health as adults. With our collaborators Dr. Alyssa Gamaldo (Penn State), Dr. Liz Munoz (UC-Riverside), and Dr. Martin Sliwinski (Penn State) and the ESCAPE team, we take a lifespan approach in this study. We examine how, over the long term, exposure to childhood adversity may predict functioning as an adult. We also examine how these e!ects may be detectable over the short term in the form of exposure and response to daily stressors. This project is supported by National Institute on Aging grant R03AG050798 to Dr. Stacey Scott.

Related to this project, former Ph.D student Dr Giancarlo Pasquini was awarded funding from the Stony Brook University Center for Inequalities to train in strategies for engaging minority communities in research by building trust between communities and researchers. The purpose of this training is to prepare a community forum for presenting the results of the ESCAPE project to the Bronx-based community from which this sample drew. This forum will encourage community members to ask questions, promoting a collaborative involvement and investment among community members and our research teams at Einstein College of Medicine, Pennsylvania State University, and Stony Brook University. We expect that this and similar events will also support recruitment and retention in our upcoming projects and collaborations, including the Einstein Aging Study.

Daily Stress and Health
Behaviors

Stress is a risk factor for many physical diseases. One possible explanation for this pattern is that the ways in which individuals respond to even minor stressors in daily life may interfere with whether they meet recommended goals for exercise or sleep. Dr. Scott is part of a team of researchers at Penn State, UC-Merced, and Oregon State on the Everyday Stress Response Targets in the Science of Behavior Change (QUINCE) project. The goals of this project involve analyzing data from multiple intensive longitudinal datasets (daily diary and ecological momentary assessment studies) in order to identify daily stress components that predict daily physical activity and sleep, and to use these findings to develop a novel stress assay and just-in-time intervention. This project is funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Health Common Fund UH2AG052167 to Drs. David Almeida and Joshua Smyth at Penn State. We are presently preparing the UH3 phase of this project, which will test ecological momentary interventions (EMI) which are triggered by the assays we uncovered in UH2.

 

 

 

 

EPI-AGEING AND STRESS

In collaboration with the Veeramah and Bernard labs we are using DNA methylation patterns to examine how biological ageing is influenced by stress in an individual’s lifetime.

 

Related links:

Zavala et al. Epigenetic Age Acceleration and Chronological Age: Associations With Cognitive Performance in Daily Life. J Gerontol A Biol Sci Med Sci. 2023