Early Life SES, Childhood Trauma Exposures, and Cardiovascular Responses to Daily Life Stressors in Middle-aged Adults

Background Dysregulation in physiological responses to stress may provide a mechanism through which low socioeconomic status (SES) in childhood negatively impacts health. Evidence linking early life SES to physiological stress responses is inconsistent. Exposure to childhood trauma may be an important source of heterogeneity accounting for mixed findings. Guided by the adaptive calibration model, we examined whether childhood SES and childhood trauma jointly predict ambulatory measures of cardiovascular responses to daily life stressors. Method A sample of 377 healthy, middle-aged adults (62