Center for Healthy Aging Research Seminar

Rutgers Center for Healthy Aging Research Seminar

featuring

David M. Almeida, PhD

Distinguished Professor of Human Development and Family Studies, Pennsylvania State University

on

“The Surprising Science of Daily Stress and Healthy Aging”

Health is fundamentally a daily process, shaped not by rare major events such as divorce, job loss, or serious illness, but by the accumulation of everyday experiences. The cumulative threads of daily stress, including exposure, appraisal, and responses, form the fabric of long-term health and resilience across the lifespan. Drawing on decades of National Study of Daily Experiences (NSDE) data, the talk introduces an Expanded Daily Stress Process Model that situates stress within daily, person-level, and community contexts, as well as its immediate and long-term effects. Challenging the assumption that stress is uniformly harmful, it highlights how manageable stress can promote adaptation and how stress processes often improve with age. By integrating psychological, social, and biological perspectives, the presentation shows that understanding and optimizing daily life is key to promoting healthy aging.

Dr. David Almeida is a Distinguished Professor of Human Development and Family Studies at Pennsylvania State University and a lifespan developmental psychologist whose work focuses on stress and coping in adulthood and aging. His research uses intensive longitudinal methods to capture both biological and self-reported indicators of stress and their links to health. Dr. Almeida’s work has centered on the role of daily stress in healthy aging, while also examining stress processes across key contexts including the workplace, family relationships, parents of children with developmental disabilities, and caregiving. His research demonstrates that minor but frequent daily stressors are often stronger predictors of health than major life events, highlighting how everyday experiences accumulate to shape long-term health and aging trajectories. His work has been widely recognized, with over 350 publications, sustained NIH funding, and national and international awards, and has helped shift the field toward understanding health as a dynamic process unfolding in daily life.

https://rutgers.zoom.us/j/94235830679?pwd=HNpveDfbZT1beIFRxY74sgv7xKUqLj.1

Meeting ID: 942 3583 0679

Password: 734587