The applicant is requesting five years of funding through the Mentored Career Development Award for New Minority Faculty (K01) to enhance his conceptual, methodological, and quantitative skills for research examining relations between individual/family/environmental factors and psychosocial and physiological outcomes in African American youth. The applicant's strong background of academic and research training in psychophysiology, coupled with his clinical psychology training, provides an excellent foundation for this work. The proposed goals of this Career Development Award including increasing knowledge base in early life-course development, multivariate analyses, and emerging psychophysiological techniques, and developing a conceptual model that synthesizes the child/adolescent developmental and psychophysiological literatures will allow the applicant to pursue multilevel systematic studies of biopsychosocial outcomes in African American youth. The research plan for this award complements the proposed training activities by proposing a longitudinal research project. This project is consistent with the working conceptual model that will be used to guide the research program of the applicant. It is hypothesized that the cumulative risk associated with these factors will be related positively to cardiovascular functioning, externalizing behavior, internalizing behavior, school code violations, and school absences at both Time-1 and Time-2. This cumulative risk is also expected to be negatively related to social competence, academic competence, and academic achievement at both Time-1 and Time-2. Alternatively, the cumulative protection associated with individual, family, and environmental factors is expected to be negatively related to cardiovascular functioning, externalizing behavior, internalizing behavior, school code violations, and school absences at both, Time-1 and Time-2. This cumulative protection is also hypothesized to be positively related to social competence, academic competence, and academic achievement at Time-1 and Time-2. Further, the cumulative risk-biopsychosocial outcome relations will be moderated by cumulative protection at both Time-1 and Time-2. The primary analytic strategy will involve multivariate regression modeling. This proposed research represents a critical next step in understanding how the processes associated with individual, familial, and environmental stimuli are relate to biopsychosocial outcomes that may have long-term implications for psychological and physical health among Africa American youth.
