This study attempts to shed light on past findings that experiences of racial and gender discrimination are associated with poor psychological and physical health outcomes by investigating the role of cognitive appraisal as a mediator of the relationship between experiences of discrimination and affective stress reactions. African American female college students (N = 115) imagined themselves in an audiotaped scenario in which they overheard 2 European American male classmates make negative evaluations of them. Participants then completed measures of causal attributions, cognitive appraisal, and affective stress reactions. Multiple regression analyses supported the hypotheses that attributions to racism and to discrimination that combines racism and sexism were associated with increased stress reactions. This relationship was mediated by cognitive appraisals of centrality.

This study examines short‐term psychological effects of prejudice attributions on African American women. Black female college students (N= 112) imagined themselves in an audiotaped scenario in which White male students made negative evaluations of them. Participants completed self‐report measures of psychological stress and state self‐esteem after they rated the likely contributions of various causal attributions to the negative evaluations. Attributions included personal characteristics of the participant and classmates, as well as 3 kinds of prejudice: racism, sexism, and ethgender prejudice (the interaction of racism and sexism). Attributions to racism and ethgender prejudice predicted increased stress and decreased state social self‐esteem. Results contradict assertions that prejudice attributions are self‐protective and imply that prejudice might involve internal and external causal dimensions.

This study examined the effects of three types of group consciousness among African American women (ethnic, feminist, and womanist) on prejudice attributions and appraised personal significance (centrality) of a negative intergroup event. African American female college students (N = 123) imagined themselves in an audiotaped scenario in which they overheard two European American male classmates make negative evaluations of them. The scenario provided no cause for the negative evaluations and no references to race or gender. Multiple regression analyses revealed that higher ethnic and womanist consciousness were related to increased prejudice attributions and greater centrality appraisals ( p < .05), while feminism had no effect. Results suggest that womanist consciousness may be more relevant than traditional feminist consciousness in predicting African American women's perceptions of prejudice.

POSaM: a fast, flexible, open-source, inkjet oligonucleotide synthesizer and microarrayer

DNA arrays are valuable tools in molecular biology laboratories. Their rapid acceptance was aided by the release of plans for a pin-spotting microarrayer by researchers at Stanford. Inkjet microarraying is a flexible, complementary technique that allows the synthesis of arrays of any oligonucleotide sequences de novo. We describe here an open-source inkjet arrayer capable of rapidly producing sets of unique 9,800-feature arrays.