Delaney JoLynn Glass

DELANEY GLASS, then a graduate student at University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, was approved funding in April 2023 to aid research on “Rethinking Evolutionary and Proximate Drivers of Pubertal Timing among Jordanian Non-Refugee and Syrian Refugee Adolescents,” supervised by Dr. Melanie Ann Martin. Stressful experiences from poverty and displacement may negatively affect teen health, biological function, and the timing of puberty. Puberty involves increases in sex hormones (testosterone, estrogen and progesterone) and a multi-year shift from being a child to being reproductively mature. How stressors do or do not influence pubertal timing has been debated over time and across social and biological sciences. One of the main mechanisms undergirding the relationship between stress and pubertal development suggests hormones related to physiological stress such as cortisol, can hasten the onset and variation in sex hormones that come online during puberty. This research examined how stressors related to forced displacement and poverty impacted variation cortisol and testosterone among Jordanian non-refugee and Syrian refugee teenagers ages 11-19 living in Northern Jordan. This project specifically examined whether the relationship between testosterone and cortisol varied by age and exposure to prior stress as well as a stress-reducing intervention. Overall, we found positive relationships between cortisol and testosterone that increased with age, with some positive associations to early life trauma, insecurity/distress, wealth, and mental health, especially for Syrian females and Jordanian males.