Building Resilience Among Women: a Social Neuroscience Approach for the Prevention of Intimate Partner Violence Consequences

The burden and prevalence of intimate partner violence (IPV) has helped recognized this issue as a global public health problem, one of particular interest in the field of mental health as women who suffer intimate partner violence present an increased prevalence of depression compared with non-exposed women. The devastating consequences of IPV on women's health have been attributed to an enduring impact of IPV on the stress system that has long-term consequences on the victim's quality of life and are mediated by changes in neuroendocrine system, particularly the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis.

Despite the critical importance of this stress system, most research on IPV has merely evaluated basal HPA activity, leaving unanswered the question of responsiveness: do women previously exposed to IPV have difficulties when coping with new emotional situations? The activation of the stress system in response to novel stressful situations is a central matter as it reflects the person's capacity to respond to the changing demands that commonly occur at work and at home. Biases for threat have been linked to chronic stress and violence, and are associated with HPA axis activity.

Under these conditions, an altered stress response may have important consequences in women's future development. For example, a job interview could be a stressful circumstance that affected women may have to face after recovering from IPV. The performance during the interview (i.e. getting or losing the job opportunity) will largely depend on the person's vulnerability to emotionally stressful situations or, on the contrary, on the successful strategies women may present to cope with acute stress. The present proposal aims at identifying these learnt vulnerabilities and resilience resources among IPV-exposed women, using valid measures of psychosocial and neuroendocrine response to acute stress.

It is hypothesized that women exposed to IPV will present a profile of increased stress vulnerability characterized by: i) a sensitized HPA axis response to acute stress, and ii) a dysfunctional psychosocial response.

To test this hypothesis, a group of women with a history of IPV will be compared to a group of women without such history from the same community in order to: 1) Assess the long-term impact of IPV on the patterns of psychosocial coping (i.e. personal attitudes and perceptions, and selective attentional processing bias) and neuroendocrine response to acute stress, 2) Examine the association between IPV and an "increased vulnerability to stress profile" characterized by dysfunctional psychosocial and neuroendocrine responses to acute stress, 3) Identify the strategies used by resilient women (psychosocial schemes, neuroendocrine regulation) to cope with acute stress, and 4) Explore the value of the above findings to inform the development of prevention resources for IPV-exposed women and at-risk groups.