Elizabeth “Birdie” Shirtcliff is working to gain a better understanding of stress in adolescents by gathering saliva samples.

Shirtcliff, an associate professor in human development and family studies, runs the Stress Physiology Innovation Team, or SPIT Laboratory on campus. Her researchers gather saliva samples and together they study hormones, like cortisol, that indicate stress.

“I like hormones because they can go right into your saliva,” Shirtcliff said. “I don’t have to collect blood. It’s really nice.”

She also likes hormones because it gives her something real and tangible to apply to understanding stress.

Shirtcliff focuses her research on young people because she finds their rapid development to be intriguing.

“Most people just try to avoid teenagers, but I think they’re fascinating because they’re actually going through the fastest development ever,” Shirtcliff said.

She said the only time the body changes as much as it does during puberty is inside the womb.

Most college students experience general stress at some point, but that isn’t the kind of stress Shirtcliff is interested in. She looks at uncontrollable, unpredictable experiences. For example, when people feel judged. This is known as the social evaluative threat, Shirtcliff said.

Cortisol levels become elevated when someone thinks they are being judged, Shirtcliff said. This hormone increase changes how your body functions to help you adapt to your environment. Cortisol can allow the body to sense emotions and predict actions more efficiently. People can be more open to social signals when their cortisol levels are high.

Shirtcliff wants to improve stress hormone measurement. In order to do that, she is inventing a device that can tell someone’s cortisol level in real time. It would take about 10-20 minutes to detect the level of cortisol.

“It would allow you to design research protocols that are specific to a certain person,” said Meg Berta, a graduate student in HDFS.

Shirtcliff also works with incarcerated youth and has found that their behavior is “an adaptive process with an undesirable outcome.”

People tend to see delinquent children as bad, but they’re just adapting to the horrible environments they’re provided with, Shirtcliff said. Incarcerated children often come from backgrounds of abuse, neglect, poverty and crime.

Jenny Phan, a graduate student in HDFS, works in the SPIT Laboratory alongside Shirtcliff and about eight other students. Phan said that the graduate students all have different research interests and they’re given the autonomy to play around with different research designs. Phan is interested in hormones related to social bonds and why some people are better at coping with stress than others.

“The big thing, I would say very broadly, that we’ve found, is that there’s this idea out there that stress is bad,” Shirtcliff said.

She doesn’t necessarily think stress hormones are bad. She thinks they help the individual adapt to the environment they’re in.

Shirtcliff is trying to show through her biological research that what really matters is the social environment that children are in.

“Our bodies change, our physiology changes, our biomarkers [molecular or cellular events that link a specific environmental exposure to a health outcome] change, but they don’t change just randomly like a big pile of spaghetti. They really change in a lawful way,” said Shirtcliff. “What makes them change is the environment that the young person is exposed to.”