Black adults' prior exposure to racial discrimination may be associated with their acute parasympathetic reactivity to and recovery from a new race-related stressor. Existing analytical approaches to investigating this link obscure nuances in the timing, magnitude, and patterns of these acute parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) responses. In a re-analysis of a prior study, we utilize an hidden Markov model (HMM) approach to examine how prior experiences of racial discrimination are associated with intraindividual patterns of (1) physiological states of PNS activity and (2) patterns of and variability in transitions between these physiological states.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Poor sleep quality affects Black women in the United States. Black young adult women experience stress from gendered racial microaggressions (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study expanded on research examining families' roles in youth gender development that has investigated boys' versus girls' family experiences by using a within-family design to study the gender socialization of brothers versus sisters from the same families. We drew from archival data collected in 2001-2002 from an ethnic homogeneous sample of Black American mother-father families ( = 128) who were raising at least one son and one daughter; the majority of youth were adolescents (range 2-31 years). In separate home interviews, mothers and fathers described whether and how they socialized their sons versus daughters about education, their futures, and racism and discrimination.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOverview: Allostatic load represents the cumulative toll of chronic mobilization of the body's stress response systems, as indexed by biomarkers. Higher levels of stress and disadvantage predict higher levels of allostatic load, which, in turn, predict poorer physical and mental health outcomes. To maximize the efficacy of prevention efforts, screening for stress- and disadvantage-associated health conditions must occur before middle age-that is, during childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Black young adult women (ages 18-35) are at disproportionate risk for obesity and emotional eating. Emotional eating interventions target psychological flexibility, such as reducing experiential avoidance and increasing acceptance of food-related thoughts. Yet Black women face gendered racism, and some endorse roles that reduce psychological flexibility, such as the superwoman schema role.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAwareness of racial health care inequities is one prerequisite to eliminating them. Although extant research has described awareness of racial health care inequities in the United States, the health impacts of such awareness on communities that are most impacted by these inequities remains unknown. Therefore, we examined associations between awareness of Black-White racial health care inequities and self-rated health for Black and White adults in the United States.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHealth Equity
November 2023
Stakeholders in biomedicine are evaluating how race corrections in clinical algorithms inequitably allocate health care resources on the basis of a misunderstanding of race-as-genetic difference. Ostensibly used to intervene on persistent disparities in health outcomes across different racial groups, these troubling corrections in risk assessments embed essentialist ideas of race as a biological reality, rather than a social and political construct that reproduces a racial hierarchy, into practice guidelines. This article explores the harms of such race corrections by considering how the technologies we use to account for disparities in health outcomes can actually innovate and amplify these harms.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe impact of COVID-19 on Black adults' social networks and their perceptions of the safety of social gatherings are intertwined. Yet, we know little about the role of this intersection and social determinants on Black adults' mental health. The goal of this study was to examine profiles of COVID-19 impact and safety for Black adults in the United States, their association with mental health, and the role of sociodemographic, health, and employment social determinants.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Racial Ethn Health Disparities
June 2024
Black undergraduates face threats to healthy weight and body image (i.e., bodily well-being).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe emerging literature highlights online racism (e.g., racist online interactions, exposure to racially traumatizing content) as a contemporary stressor among racially/ethnically minoritized adults.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe investigated the content of liberal and conservative news media Facebook posts on race and ethnic health disparities. A total of 3,327,360 liberal and conservative news Facebook posts from the United States (US) from January 2015 to May 2022 were collected from the Crowd Tangle platform and filtered for race and health-related keywords. Qualitative content analysis was conducted on a random sample of 1750 liberal and 1750 conservative posts.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSleep quality in young adulthood sets the stage for long-term health. Racial/ethnic sleep disparities between White college-attending young adults and college-attending young adults of color exist. The stress of experiencing racial/ethnic discrimination makes it difficult for college-attending young adults of color to get good quality sleep.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Psychosis is more prevalent among Black individuals compared with White individuals. However, it is unknown whether this disparity exists among college populations in the United States, and if so, what factors contribute to the disparity.
Methods: We analyzed data from Black and White young adult students using the Health Minds Study (2020-2021), which is a survey administered at 140 colleges in the U.
In this conceptual article, we assert that psychology should be transformed to adopt the explicit goal of working toward the liberation of people oppressed by society rather than striving for mere equality. To achieve such a transformation, it is necessary to reenvision graduate training in psychology. Graduate training in psychology is an important vehicle by which psychologists can become prepared to use research and practice to eradicate inequities in society.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUsing data from an online survey assessing perceptions of 12 target photos of Black and White males and females, the current study examined a moderated mediation model of sexual orientation perceptions ( = 310). Results indicated that perceived masculinity/femininity was not a mediator in the association between target gender and perceived sexual orientation. Black male targets were perceived to be more heterosexual than White male targets, Black female targets were perceived as less heterosexual than White female targets, and Black targets were perceived as more masculine than White targets.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBlack individuals face psychological distress resulting from lifetime experiences of racial discrimination, and these experiences may be especially harmful to Black college students as they forge their social identities. One way to examine psychological distress induced by racial discrimination is by assessing affect reactivity, or the degree to which aspects of individuals' mood changes in response to a stressor. This quantitative investigation examines the association between lifetime racial discrimination frequency and stress responses to acute racial discrimination via two aspects of affect reactivity, valence and arousal, and if coping strategies moderate this association.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The Environmental Affordances Model theorizes that systemic racism disproportionately exposes African Americans in the United States to chronic everyday stressors (e.g., individual racism) while simultaneously shaping the availability of coping resources (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDespite notable improvements in theory and methods that center the lived experiences of Black adolescents, White supremacy endures in developmental science. In this article, we focus on one methodological manifestation of White supremacy-sampling decisions that assume Black adolescents are a homogeneous group. We examine overlooked concerns about within-group designs with Black adolescents, such as the erasure of some African diasporic communities in the United States.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study examines associations between individual racism, anticipatory racism-related stress, and anti-racism activism among Black adolescents (n = 443; M = 15.6; 57.4% female) and emerging adults (n = 447; M = 23.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSoc Identities
September 2022
Arab Americans constitute a diverse, sizeable ethnic minority in the United States. However, limited research has examined the content of Arab American ethnic identity and whether this ethnic identity differs by demographic factors. In the present study, we developed measures of Arab American ethnic identity and cultural practice, and assessed differences in those variables by gender, religious affiliation (Muslim, Christian), and age.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn this investigation, we examined the associations between state-level structural sexism-a multidimensional index of gender inequities across economic, political, and cultural domains of the gender system-and health care access and quality among women and men in the United States. We linked administrative data gauging state-level gender gaps in pay, employment, poverty, political representation, and policy protections to individual-level data on health care availability, affordability, and quality from the national Consumer Survey of Health Care Access (2014-2019; N = 24,250). Results show that higher state-level sexism is associated with greater inability to access needed health care and more barriers to affording care for women but not for men.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTo quantify racial/ethnic differences in the relationship between state-level sexism and barriers to health care access among non-Hispanic White, non-Hispanic Black, and Hispanic women in the United States. We merged a multidimensional state-level sexism index compiled from administrative data with the national Consumer Survey of Health Care Access (2014-2019; n = 10 898) to test associations between exposure to state-level sexism and barriers to access, availability, and affordability of health care. Greater exposure to state-level sexism was associated with more barriers to health care access among non-Hispanic Black and Hispanic women, but not non-Hispanic White women.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: This study examines the associations between state-level and provider sources of racism and healthcare access and quality for non-Hispanic Black and White individuals.
Methods: Data from 2 sources were integrated: (1) data from the Association of American Medical Colleges' Consumer Survey of Health Care Access (2014-2019), which included measures of self-reported healthcare access, healthcare quality, and provider racial discrimination and (2) administrative data compiled to index state-level racism. State-level racism composite scores were calculated from federal sources (U.