Associations of regional racial attitudes with chronic illness in the United States.

Rationale: A growing body of literature has identified a robust relationship between the experience of racial discrimination and negative self-reported physical and mental health outcomes.

Objective: The current study seeks to identify which factors -at the community level- predict racial disparities in actual disease manifestation. This study focuses on the extent to which regional demographics and racial attitudes, both implicit and explicit, are associated with prevalence rates of several diseases for Black and White patients in the United States.

Stereotype-based stressors facilitate emotional memory neural network connectivity and encoding of negative information to degrade math self-perceptions among women.

Stress engendered by stereotype threatening situations may facilitate encoding of negative, stereotype confirming feedback received during a performance among women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). It is unclear, however, whether this process is comprised of the same neurophysiological mechanisms evident in any emotional memory encoding context, or if this encoding bias directly undermines positive self-perceptions in the stigmatized domain. A total of 160 men and women completed a math test that provided veridical positive and negative feedback, a memory test for feedback, and math self-enhancing and valuing measures in a stereotype threatening or neutral context while continuous electroencephalography activity and startle probe responses to positive and negative feedback was recorded.

Spontaneous default mode network phase-locking moderates performance perceptions under stereotype threat.

This study assessed whether individual differences in self-oriented neural processing were associated with performance perceptions of minority students under stereotype threat. Resting electroencephalographic activity recorded in white and minority participants was used to predict later estimates of task errors and self-doubt on a presumed measure of intelligence. We assessed spontaneous phase-locking between dipole sources in left lateral parietal cortex (LPC), precuneus/posterior cingulate cortex (P/PCC), and medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC); three regions of the default mode network (DMN) that are integral for self-oriented processing.