The main objective of this research project is to examine the use of coping strategies, specifically religiosity and repressive coping, in African American and Caucasian populations to explore whether these strategies can help account for the similar levels of psychological stress seen between African Americans and Caucasians, despite the fact that African Americans tend to experience greater exposure to stressful conditions. In addition, this project will examine whether certain coping strategies, particularly repressive coping, may be harmful to cardiovascular functioning, increasing physical health risk among African Americans compared to Caucasians. This research will help clarify the disjunction between stress and mental health outcomes among African-Americans, as well as the disjunction between positive mental health outcomes and poor physical health outcomes among African-Americans. ? Four experiments are proposed to examine the relationship between coping strategies and affective and biological responses to acute social stressors. These experiments will test the hypothesis that while certain coping strategies may buffer psychological stress, they may exacerbate physiological stress resulting in adverse physical health outcomes in the long term. Specifically, the proposed studies will determine: 1) whether religiosity and repressive coping strategies are more likely to be used by African Americans compared to Caucasians, 2) whether religiosity and repressive coping can buffer the effects of stress during evaluative tasks, and 3) whether repressive coping can elicit maladaptive cardiovascular functioning (i.e. threat reactivity) during evaluative tasks. Experiment 1 is a questionnaire study that examines race differences in religiosity, self esteem, and general health while Experiment 2 examines the mediating role of religiosity in buffering the effects of stress during evaluative tasks. Experiment 3 will examine whether individuals using repressive coping strategies are likely to report challenge appraisals, but exhibit threat cardiovascular reactivity during stressful evaluative tasks. Finally, Experiment 4 will test whether the disjunction between challenge appraisals and threat cardiovascular reactivity can be influenced by having repressive copers express their emotions in a safe environment. These studies will further our understanding of the complex interplay between social cognition and biological factors for African Americans which has direct applications to healthcare and clinical psychology. ? ? ? ?
