Effects of Racism on Brain and Physiological Pathways to Health Disparities

项目摘要 种族主义是当代社会最紧迫和影响最广泛的危机之一， 一系列不利的健康结果，包括美国黑人的死亡率，但神经科学家和 迄今为止，心理学家一直回避直接研究个人的种族主义经历， 以及它们对大脑、精神和身体的影响。这种调查是必要的，因为它将 使我们能够更好地描述将种族主义经历与健康联系起来的机制途径， 因此，我们需要制定解决这些差距的潜在战略。重复暴露于 种族主义可能会触发并放大一系列与压力相关大脑和生理反应， 已知介导不良健康结果的风险升高。在这个项目中，我们将研究几个 这个机械级联的元素。我们的目标是以新颖的方式应用经过验证的科学范式， 检查大脑，生理和心理反应的回忆，具体的个人 与其他类型的生活经历相比， 黑人或非裔美国人。我们还将用前瞻性的智能手机为基础的生态瞬间 评估（EMA）方法，以衡量与种族主义的经验，因为他们的频率和严重性， 发生在日常生活中的真实的时间，我们将这些措施与大脑，生理， 健康成果。我们将研究对种族主义的大脑/生理反应之间的关系， 以及健康结果和功能指标--例如心理困扰、心血管疾病 疾病风险，细胞衰老（端粒长度），头发皮质醇，应对，情绪调节和社会 支持-并确定大脑和生理反应是否介导之间的关系 种族主义暴露程度和健康结果。拟议的调查代表了一种创新的 范式转变，将种族主义视为影响健康的其他病理生理过程。我们 组建了一个跨学科的团队，在神经成像，创伤， 压力的生物标志物，健康差异的生理学观点，生态瞬间 评估，情绪调节和反黑人种族主义的实证研究，产生了一个合作 这是一个独特的和协同的努力。这是一种有潜力改变 神经科学家和心理学家概念化和研究种族主义，帮助克服一些种族主义。 这些障碍阻碍了以前对种族主义个人经历的科学调查。 我们的中心目标之一是增加少数参与者的代表性， 在NIH资助的研究中，历史上被抽样不足，并促进培训和职业生涯 促进代表性不足的研究实习生，符合NIH的目标。

Project Summary Racism is one of the most urgent and broadly impactful crises in contemporary society, increasing an array of adverse health outcomes including mortality in Black Americans, yet neuroscientists and psychologists have heretofore shied away from directly examining personal experiences with racism and their consequences on the brain, mind, and body. Such investigation is essential because it will allow us to better characterize mechanistic pathways linking experiences with racism to health disparities and to devise potential strategies for addressing such disparities. Repeated exposures to racism likely trigger and amplify a cascade of stress-related brain and physiological responses that are known to mediate elevated risk for adverse health outcomes. In this project, we will examine several elements of this mechanistic cascade. We aim to apply validated scientific paradigms in novel ways to examine brain, physiological, and psychological responses to the recollection of specific personal experiences with racism – compared to other types of life experiences – among people who identify as Black or African American. We will also use prospective smartphone-based ecological momentary assessment (EMA) methods to measure the frequency and severity of experiences with racism as they occur in daily life in real time, and we will associate these measures with brain, physiological, and health outcomes. We will examine the relationship between brain/physiological responses to racism and health outcomes and functioning measures – such as psychological distress, cardiovascular disease risk, cellular aging (telomere length), hair cortisol, coping, emotion regulation, and social support – and determine whether brain and physiological responses mediate the relationship between extent of racism exposure and health outcomes. The proposed investigation represents an innovative paradigm shift, in which racism is treated like other pathophysiological processes that affect health. We have assembled an interdisciplinary team with expertise in areas including neuroimaging, trauma, biomarkers of stress, physiological perspectives on health disparities, ecological momentary assessment, emotion regulation, and the empirical study of anti-Black racism, yielding a collaborative effort that is unique and synergistic. It is an approach with potential to transform the way that neuroscientists and psychologists conceptualize and study racism, helping to overcome some of the obstacles that have prevented previous scientific investigation of personal experiences with racism. Among our central aims is to increase the representation of a minoritized participant population that has been historically undersampled in NIH-funded research, and to promote the training and career advancement of underrepresented research trainees, consistent with NIH goals.