Stress and the mental health of populations of color: advancing our understanding of race-related stressors.
Open accessAbstract
This article provides an overview of research on race-related stressors that can affect the mental health of socially disadvantaged racial and ethnic populations. It begins by reviewing the research on self-reported discrimination and mental health. Although discrimination is the most studied aspect of racism, racism can also affect mental health through structural/institutional mechanisms and racism that is deeply embedded in the larger culture. Key priorities for research include more systematic attention to stress proliferation processes due to institutional racism, the assessment of stressful experiences linked to natural or manmade environmental crises, documenting and understanding the health effects of hostility against immigrants and people of color, cataloguing and quantifying protective resources, and enhancing our understanding of the complex association between physical and mental health.
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People of color exposed to race-related stressors often develop emotional and behavioral avoidance that maintain mental health symptoms.
“POC exposed to race-related stressors often develop emotional (eg, unwillingness to experience sadness after being discriminated against) and behavioral (eg, evading places or situations where discrimination is anticipated to occur) avoidance that maintain mental health symptoms [5,6,8].”
From App-Based Mindfulness Meditation for People of Color Who Experience Race-Related Stress: Protocol for a Randomized Controlled Trial (2022) · cites this paper as [5]
The section “Vigilance and the Threat of Exposure to Discrimination” (page unavailable) describes efforts to minimize exposure to anticipated discrimination and reports an association between heightened vigilance and depressive symptoms. It does not say that people of color often develop emotional avoidance, such as unwillingness to feel sadness, or that emotional or behavioral avoidance maintains mental health symptoms. (LLM, conf=0.84)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredPrior research on mental health and inequality demonstrates that external social structures condition mental health above and beyond individual experiences.
“Prior research on mental health and inequality demonstrates that external social structures condition mental health above and beyond individual experiences (Sewell et al., 2016; Huyser et al., 2018; Williams, 2018).”
From The Social Roots of Suicide: Theorizing How the External Social World Matters to Suicide and Suicide Prevention (2021) · cites this paper as Williams, 2018
Rumination and emotion suppression are maladaptive emotion regulation strategies often used by people of color exposed to race-related stressors.
“Considering that rumination (ie, the passive and repetitive focus on the causes and consequences of one’s distress) [27] and emotion suppression (ie, the active reduction of emotionally expressive behavior when emotionally aroused) [28] are maladaptive emotion regulation strategies often used by POC exposed to race-related stressors [5,6,8,29]”
From App-Based Mindfulness Meditation for People of Color Who Experience Race-Related Stress: Protocol for a Randomized Controlled Trial (2022) · cites this paper as [5]
The sections on racial discrimination, vigilance, and protective factors discuss mental-health effects and responses to race-related stress, but do not identify rumination or emotion suppression as strategies often used by people of color. Searches for those terms and for coping or emotion-regulation responses found no passage addressing that specific claim; page numbers were not available in our copy. (LLM, conf=0.73)
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References 126 · Cited by 1,014
Research works printed but not linked: 5
- American Psychological Association. 2016, “ Stress in America: The Impact of Discrimination. Stress in America Survey”. Retrieved 2016 (https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/stress/2015/impact-of-discrimination.pdf).
- American Psychological Association. 2017, “ Stress in America: Coping with Change. Stress in America Survey”. Retrieved February 22, 2017, (https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/stress/2016/coping-with-change.PDF).
- Dohrenwend Bruce P. Dohrenwend Barbara S. 1969 Social Status and Psychological Disorder: A Casual Inquiry. New York: Wiley.
- Moody Mia 2012 “ New Media-Same Stereotypes: An Analysis of Social Media Depictions of President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama.” The Journal of New Media & Culture 8(1): 1– 23.
- Taylor J and Grundy C 1996 “Nadanolitization [Nad] Scale (1978).” Pp. 217– 26 in Handbook of Tests and Measurements for Black Populations, Vol. 2, edited by Jones RL Hampton, VA: Cobb & Henry Publishers.
- Authors
- Williams, D. R.
- Affiliations
- Harvard University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Williams, David R.
- ORCID
- Williams, David R.
- Venue
- Journal of Health and Social Behavior
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2018-11-28
- Volume
- 59
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 466-485
- ISSN
- 0022-1465 (ISSN-L)
- 2150-6000
- PMC
- PMC6532404
- OpenAlex
- W2902569044
- Cited by
- 1,014
- References
- 126
- Citations by year
- 2026: 110 · 2025: 162 · 2024: 156 · 2023: 221 · 2022: 151 · 2021: 164 · 2020: 34 · 2019: 13 · 2018: 1
- FWCI
- 120.42
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Journal of Health and Social Behavior (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (acceptedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- Funders
- National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (R01 MD 009719)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Racial and Ethnic Identity Research
- Social Sciences › Health › Health disparities and outcomes
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Gender, Health, and Social Inequality
- Keywords
- mental health, racial and ethnic minorities, discrimination, racism, institutional racism, structural racism, environmental crisis, protective factors, physical and mental health, disadvantaged groups
- MeSH terms
- Mental Disorders, Black or African American, Delivery of Health Care, Humans, Mental Health, Minority Groups, Stress, Psychological, Racism
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