Ryan L. Brown

@ryanlinnbrown.bsky.social

3326 Followers 987 Following

A very curious social-health psychologist! 🤠 Assistant Professor, Texas Tech University 💫 PI, @starlabteam.bsky.social‬ 📄 Associate Editor, British Journal of Health Psychology 🎤 Host, Stress Puzzle podcast ryanlinnbrown.com

The Biological Cost of Chronic Stress: Allostatic Load and Newer Conceptualizations 7 November 2025 9am -12 pm PDT
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Razia presenting in front of a captivated crowd on “Social reappraisal: Finding new perspectives with other people can boost emotion regulation”
4. Primate Politics: Intergenerational and experimental evidence 5. The Energetic Cost of Chronic Stress 6. Stress Beyond the Individual: The physiological cost of caring
Good Stress and Bad Stress: Measurement in a world of wearables Slavich on Stress: Complexities, history, and future Human Hierarchies and Health: Epidemiological evidence
THE STRESS PUZZLE That's All Folks (for Season 1!) Season 1 Wrapped 12 episodes 13 expert guests spanning anthropology, cell biology, developmental science, epidemiology, and psychology 200+ subscribers and 3000+ listeners from 50+ countries Want to support the show? Here’s how! Share with your friends, family, and colleagues Leave 5 ⭐️ reviews wherever you listen to podcasts Season 2 premieres this Fall!
So I think we are not too bad at changing those emotional states. What hasn't really been demonstrated very convincingly, at least to my mind, is that that translates into the physical health outcome. So you know that you get, for example, some people who have heart disease, who are depressed. You manage their depression their various ways, both talking therapies and pharmacotherapists who might do that, and so you might improve their depressed state. But to demonstrate that that then has a the subsequent effect on their physical health is something which really hasn't been demonstrated in a convincing way, in a very large scale. So far. I think it will happen, but it hasn't happened terribly much yet. And so we're sort of at the level of trying to manage those sort of emotional health and wellbeing issues, but to try to show those are going to be translated into the physical health outcomes, into the benefit of people, it's still an important challenge.
Figure on why do we feel sick and behave in a sick way when ill from Lasselin et al., 2018
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Ryan in cap and gown next to her dad in a wheelchair with a fountain behind them.
EPISODE 12 An Integrative Approach to Population Health: Social connections and emotional well-being in aging with Dr. Andrew Steptoe
That was sort of the driving hypothesis. And we went in thinking like, well, who's going to be most affected by economic uncertainty? The younger adults who are looking for their new jobs, establishing themselves and their careers, having to pay new housing prices, and then older adults who are relying on retirement savings. And like, the wonderful thing about doing science is that, if you get surprised and you have to revise, what we found is that people most likely to be affected who are the most stressed, the 2010s were the midlife adults.So, on average, they had 19% more stressor days compared to the same age counterparts. In 1995, they had their psychological distress was 50% higher compared to their earlier counterparts, and we found that this was primarily due to them feeling risk over their finances as well as their risk over their future plans. And so it seems like daily life was getting more stressful for people at midlife.
To have adolescents naturally seek out experiences where they are giving invaluable ways to their group and gaining respect and admiration and belonging through contribution seems to be wired into these systems, not as shifting behavior, but shifting learning priorities. Now, this creates a lot of vulnerabilities for kids who are trying to maximize their likes on social media or posting pictures of themselves, they're getting deluged with feedback that could be really distorting. On the other hand, the sensitivity to social value through pro social opportunities, learning to be kind and caring and supportive of other people gaining social value through those pathways could be enormously adaptive, and it doesn't require super status competition, where only the 3% of people that get the highest scores on standardized grades matter to the university systems of highest prestige.
David Almeida 0:00 What I tell people is that there is some good news for growing older, and one is that you seem to handle daily stress better as you grow older, and this is consistent with a lot of theories of emotion regulation as we age. So, what we find with you know, because we have this longitudinal study, we've now been collecting data over 20 years of people's adult lives, and as people grow older, they report fewer daily stressors. So, from your 20s all the way to your 70s, on average, people are experiencing less exposure to daily stressors. As I mentioned before, what seems to be, you know, more important is what we call stressor reactivity, so negative emotions on days you have stressors. And here again, we see an age advantage. Is that as people grow older, they are less reactive to daily stressors.
EPISODE 11 30 Years of Daily Stress Research: Insights into everyday stress and emotion processes and how they shift as we age with Dr. David Almeida
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And I was aware of work that Cheryl Woods-Giscombé had been doing, looking at, I think the paper was entitled, whose stress is making me sick, and that quote from my sister lined up perfectly with this idea around the cost of caring So, Cheryl Woods-Giscombé you know, this really catchy title, but it built on this sociological work that I was also aware of, because, again, I study stress, and I study how these lived experiences contribute to a cardiovascular risk. So, there had been a body of research, mostly theoretical or the empirical work was really dealing with mental health outcomes that made this argument that for women, it was not only the things that impacted them, but also the things that impacted the people that they were close to.
We don't want to throw the baby away with the bathwater, meaning we don't want to tell women not to be strong. We don't even want to tell women not to care for others, because that is a really important component of people's identity. But how can they be strong and care for themselves while also finding ways to care for others? So it's really a great way to help women become more aware of the dynamics of their stress and coping experiences in the context of their families and in the context of society, and then they can make decisions about how to navigate healthy changes in their lifestyle and their coping strategies.
And we were using generic ways to measure stress, and so we weren't really capturing the fullness of the ways that stress might impact health, and we weren't including things like gender related stress. We weren't including things like race related stress, and we weren't including some of the nuances of how black women cope with stress. And so with Marci's mentoring and mentoring other professors, I started to ask questions and worked on this concept that you named, called the Superwoman Schema in your question.
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Ryan on stage presenting her dissertation
The Stress Puzzle. EPISODE 10 Superwoman Schema: Nuances of stress, resilience, and the superwoman schema framework with Dr. Cheryl Woods Giscombé
Keely Muscatell on stage sharing a slide including multiple papers
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Anita, Cristina, Karina, and Ryan in front of the SBSM 2025 banner
Andrew Steptoe receiving his award from Tara Gruenwald following an introduction by Julian Thayer. Aric Prather is joyfully capturing the moment in a photo.
We're increasingly interested in the early phase of adolescence, and more specifically, we think about this as a transition from childhood into adolescence. Part of what makes that formative is that there are changes, not only in the body and rapid physical growth and sexual maturation and these hormones that affect physical and physiological systems, but also because these changes, as puberty is just beginning, sensitizes certain kinds of learning, particularly social learning, affective learning, emotional learning in new ways, and there are new proclivities for exploring relationships in new ways, not only the early kindling of romantic interests and crushes in new ways, but also creating intense friendships and learning about self and other trial and error, reinforcement learning models of experimenting with who you are. Adolescents want to fit in, and they want to stand out, and that's part of the challenge for this period.
Society for Biopsychosocial Science and Medicine 2025 Annual Meeting ... Whova Leaderboard Ranking Celebrating the most active members of the community at Society for Biopsychosocial Science and Medicine 2025 Annual Meeting Ryan Brown ranked #1
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Dr. Ron Dahl is pictured for Episode 9 titled, Investing in Adolescence: Positive emotions, prosocial learning, and the digital landscape for interventions with Dr. Ronald Dahl.
Ryan in a pink sweater set taking a selfie of Allie’s guest lecture with Allie’s face and title slide on the screen
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I saw the work that that was done with peripuberty with the rat, I started thinking... Well, you know, it would be really tasteful if we evolved so that during this period of really marked biological change of puberty and marked hormonal regulatory change of puberty, maybe that helped open up the system again, to sample how harsh or benign is my context, and to sort of adjust systems stress system accordingly, right before you reach the time when you're reproductively ready to have offspring, right sort of a reasonable time to readjust!
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The Stress Puzzle Episode 8 Recalibration of Early Life Stress Systems: Impact of puberty with Dr. Megan Gunnar. Dr. Megan Gunnar is pictured smiling.
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NIH awarded $1.85 BILLION in grants and contracts during FY2023 that directly supported 29,563 JOBS and $5.8 BILLION economic activity in Texas. The highest annual occurrences of disease deaths in Texas are due to HEART DISEASE, COVID-19, CANCER, STROKE and ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE. Top-funded research institutions in Texas include: • University of Texas System • Baylor University System • University of North Texas System • Texas A&M University System • University of Houston • Methodist Hospital Research Institute • Texas Biomedical Research Institute • Rice University • Texas Tech University • Dell Federal Systems Jobs Supported by NIH Extramural Research: 29,563 Economic Activity Supported: $5.8B Biopharmeceutical Industry Jobs: 111,711 Biopharmeceutical Industry Businesses: 7,306
Catch up on the Stress Puzzle: Good Stress and Bad Stress: Measurement in a world of wearables Slavich on Stress: Complexities, history, and future Human Hierarchies and Health: Epidemiological evidence Primate Politics: Intergenerational and experimental evidence
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Dr. Aric Prather. EPISODE 7 Stress, Immunity, and Illness: Insights from experimental common cold studies on holiday susceptibility
Basically the more network stressors women reported, the higher their blood pressures, both during the day and at night, the more likely they were to have sustained hypertension, which is being above the clinical cut point as they're kind of in the clinic, sitting down and in daily life. And we found that there were stronger associations between reports of network stressors and ambulatory blood pressure than between the reports of personal stressors and ambulatory blood pressure. So basically, the idea is that it wasn't so much the things that were happening to the women themselves, but it was the things that were happening to people in their network. You know, it's not necessarily the neighbor across the street. These are people that you're close to, so your partner, your children, your other relatives, your close friends. So those are the things that seem to be having the biggest impact on women's blood pressure in our cohort.