Applied Social Neuroscience: the Building Resilience Among Women Project

Plain-language summary

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is the most common and alarming form of violence against women, affecting up to 25% of all women in Catalonia. It is a complex phenomenon that involves aspects of social interaction, cognitive-emotional processes, neurobiological alterations and cultural context. Using an integrative methodology, IPV will be approached as a form of chronic exposure to severe stress that alters the stress-response system of exposed women, affecting their capacity to cope with future everyday situations. Fortunately, coping strategies can be subject to change through learning mechanisms and thus the identification of vulnerabilities can help build resilience strategies that may have a long-lasting impression on women's healthy functioning. It is proposed that the sustained exposure to violent social interactions impacts two key aspects of future behavior: i) altered psychosocial coping, and ii) enhanced emotional reactivity to acute stress. To test this hypothesis, the psychosocial and neurobiological response to common social acute stress will be analyzed among women with and without previous exposure to IPV. The Trier Social Stress Task (TSST) will be used, which is a valid test of acute stress that resembles the real life situation of a (mock) job interview. Based on a social neuroscience perspective, quantitative and qualitative measures will be used of cognitive performance, neuroendocrine activity and face-to-face interviews to obtain an integrative description of the response to the TSST that includes the personal narrative of the experience by women themselves. Finally, the proposal will benefit from the fact that all participants will share the same experimental condition (the TSST), and this mock job interview will be used as the common reference point for a workshop about the difficulties and strengths put to test during a stressful situation. The focus of this workshop will be on raising awareness of such coping limitations and abilities that participants themselves will be able to identify. The results of this workshop will inform guidelines and recommendations for future work and prevention strategies, and participants will be invited to be an active part in our dissemination strategy

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