Developmental Adaptation, Stress, and Health (DASH) Lab

Welcome to the Developmental Adaptation, Stress, and Health (DASH) Lab!

Dr. Bruce Ellis and research assistant Marilynn Santana

Work in the Developmental Adaptation, Stress, and Health (DASH) lab both challenges and complements the prevailing deficit model of social-cognitive development in harsh and unpredictable environments. This deficit model focuses on impairments in learning and behavior in children and adolescents who grow up under stressful conditions. We have argued that the deficit model captures a crucial part of reality, but is also incomplete because it critically misses how individuals developmentally form their cognitive skills and abilities to solve recurrent problems faced in their local ecologies. Further, certain responses to high-adversity contexts (e.g., steep future discounting), which are frequently conceptualized as dysfunctional, may be biologically adaptive, even if these responses are undesirable and something we would like to change. Research in the DASH lab focuses on the social-cognitive skills and abilities that develop in high-adversity contexts and can be leveraged in education, jobs, policy, and interventions.

More broadly, we are interested in developmental adaptations to stress and their consequences for health and disease. Thus, we study how the developing child becomes matched—and mismatched—to current and expected future environments. We attempt to map the processes and mechanisms through which childhood experiences influence adaptive and maladaptive neural, cognitive, and behavioral outcomes.