The Health Equity in Youth lab is based within the Psychology Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. We study how social identities impact day-to-day experiences and how individuals respond to these experiences across development. Adolescence is a developmental period starting with puberty and typically spans ages 12-24. Youth develop their identities, learn to manage academic challenges, and form strong social relationships with friends and family during this period. However, youth also experience social stressors that can be distressing and elicit bodily responses, including a change in heart rate. It requires energy to mobilize these responses, and over time they can negatively impact health by wearing out bodily systems. We examine how aspects of social identity, due to culture or due to differences in how people are treated in society, can impact the types of daily experiences that youth encounter and how they respond. The goal of this work is to ultimately identify whether these differences might contribute to disparities in health, thereby contributing to our understanding of how existing inequality in social policy can get under the skin to worsen health.

Much of our work has suggested that youth from marginalized backgrounds (e.g., racially minoritized or low-income individuals) tend to internalize feelings that they are lower in the social hierarchy relative to their peers. These negative feelings can carry over to affect how adolescents and young adults respond to academic and social stressors.