This National Science Foundation Minority Postdoctoral Fellowship will generate new knowledge about coping with race-related stress in African Americans, significantly enhancing the Fellow's skills as a research scientist, and contribute to the future vitality of scientific enterprise. The Fellow will perform his research at Howard University under Dr. Jules Harrell in the Psychology Department. Howard University has an excellent track record in producing research that examines the diversity of the African American experience. Additionally, Dr. Harrell's research investigates physiological systems and personality factors that account for individual differences in responses to stress in people of African descent. The research combines quantitative and qualitative approaches to investigate the relations among racism experiences, racial identity, coping, and cardiac activity. The first phase of the research will recruit first-year African American college students to participate in a longitudinal study of African Americans' experiences with racism, examining whether: (1) discrimination experiences predict changes in cardiac activity, (2) racial identity buffers the negative effects of race-related stress experiences on changes in cardiac activity, and (3) the relation between discrimination experiences and changes in cardiac output is mediated by racial identity and coping. The second phase of the study will choose a subset of Phase I study participants on the basis of their cardiac activity and racial identity to participate in semi-structured interviews, examining patterns and processes through which African American coping responses relate to cardiac activity. Grounded theory methods will be used to analyze the data, thus allowing for the generation of new theory. The training objectives are to enhance the Fellow's theoretical approaches to the study of race-related stress and coping, to gain skills in psychophysiology, and to build his evolving program of research, which examines the influence of African American experiences with race-related stress and the consequence of these experiences for psychological adjustment. These training goals will help the Fellow attain a tenure-track professorship at a research-extensive university. Seminars, coursework, and participation in the Psychophysiology Laboratory at Howard will expand his scope of training experiences and prepare him to explore coping with racism in new and innovative ways. Fellowship activities will allow him to build on existing theory, increasing basic knowledge about race-related risk and protective factors, coping, and overall functioning in African Americans.
