This project investigates how racial discrimination impacts African Americans' physiological functioning and psychological adjustment.
Intellectual Merit:
This research consists of two studies. The primary research aim of the first study is to combine experimental and ambulatory blood pressure monitoring approaches to examine how African Americans emotionally and physiologically respond to actual racial discrimination that occurs in the lab, over a 24-hour period. Additionally, the study explicates the processes that account for these relationships. The primary research aim of the second study is to examine whether eating as a coping strategy mitigates the impact of racial discrimination on emotional and physiological outcomes. This study also examines whether physiological coping processes mitigate the relationship between racial discrimination and emotional outcomes.
Broader Impacts:
This research has the potential to: (1) greatly enhance our understanding of how racial discrimination is psychologically experienced and capture the variability in African Americans' experiences; (2) identify the processes that explicate the link between racial discrimination and psychological adjustment and physiological functioning; (3) elucidate how racial discrimination is experienced over time; and (4) provide a conceptual framework and methodological approach that can be employed as tools for future studies. The studies provide an excellent opportunity to investigate causal attribution, cognitive appraisal, and coping processes as potential pathways for understanding the deleterious consequences of racial discrimination. In studying racial discrimination, the studies contribute to the current research literature by employing ecologically valid research designs in which African Americans actually experience racial discrimination. The findings from the research will help to determine whether racial discrimination is a distinct stressor with emotional and physiological consequences that exceed those of nonracial stressors and whether there is more to the experience of racial discrimination than what is currently captured in generic models of stress and coping. Additionally, the studies collectively elucidate the processes that underlie racial discrimination and the ways in which racial discrimination unfolds both within and beyond the laboratory context.
