A preliminary experimental examination of worldview verification, perceived racism, and stress reactivity in African Americans.

Abstract

Objective According to worldview verification theory, inconsistencies between lived experiences and worldviews are psychologically threatening. These inconsistencies may be key determinants of stress processes that influence cardiovascular health disparities. This preliminary examination considers how experiencing injustice can affect perceived racism and biological stress reactivity among African Americans. Guided by worldview verification theory, it was hypothesized that responses to receiving an unfair outcome would be moderated by fairness of the accompanying decision process, and that this effect would further depend on the consistency of the decision process with preexisting justice beliefs. Method A sample of 118 healthy African American adults completed baseline measures of justice beliefs, followed by a laboratory-based social-evaluative stressor task. Two randomized fairness manipulations were implemented during the task: participants were given either high or low levels of distributive (outcome) and procedural (decision process) justice. Glucocorticoid (cortisol) and inflammatory (C-reactive protein) biological responses were measured in oral fluids, and attributions of racism were also measured. Results The hypothesized 3-way interaction was generally obtained. Among African Americans with a strong belief in justice, perceived racism, cortisol and C-reactive protein responses to low distributive justice were higher when procedural justice was low. Among African Americans with a weak belief in justice however, these responses were higher when a low level of distributive justice was coupled with high procedural justice. Conclusions Biological and psychological processes that contribute to cardiovascular health disparities are affected by consistency between individual-level and contextual justice factors.

Perceived Discrimination, Racial Identity, and Multisystem Stress Response to Social Evaluative Threat Among African American Men and Women

“…These variations were fully crossed and simultaneously implemented ten minutes prior to the fourth salivary collection timepoint. A substantive consideration of these manipulations is provided elsewhere (46). Of current interest, hierarchical multiple regressions were also repeated while controlling for both protocol variations to ensure that links between perceived discrimination, racial identity and coordinated biological responses were robust.…”

Chronic Medical Conditions and Negative Affect; Racial Variation in Reciprocal Associations Over Time

“…Lucas and colleagues have shown that psychological as well as biological processes that contribute to cardiovascular health disparities are not simply the consequence of individual level exposures but the interplay between individual-level and contextual factors (e.g., views about justice) (63). Mezuk et al have suggested that behaviors may explain why the links between emotional and physical health problems are weaker among Blacks (41).…”

Coordination of cortisol response to social evaluative threat with autonomic and inflammatory responses is moderated by stress appraisals and affect

“…The Trier Social Stress Test has been shown to activate multiple stress-responsive systems—not only the HPA axis, but also the sympathetic nervous system and immune system (see review by Allen, Kennedy, Cryan, Dinan, & Clarke, 2014)—and thus offers an ideal backdrop against which to study multisystem stress response coordination. Other investigations using this dataset have focused on multisystem coordination during discrete phases of the stress response and associations with perceived discrimination and racial identity (Lucas et al, under review), and how different aspects of the stress response relate to fit between justice beliefs and experienced injustice (Lucas et al, 2016). By contrast, the current study examines different levels of pairwise coordination among stress systems (i.e., within-person matched phase coordination and between-person differences in average level coordination) and probes the consequences of such coordination by relating individual differences in temporal coordination to post-stress appraisals and affect.…”